


A Road Too Far

by SylvanWitch



Category: Generation Kill
Genre: Afghanistan AU, M/M, Post-Series AU, spy!fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-08
Updated: 2013-08-08
Packaged: 2017-12-22 19:02:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 69,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/916911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>April 2006.  Bermel District, Paktika Province, Afghanistan.  In the most dangerous corner of the most dangerous country in the world, Nate Fick, aka Nick Frazier, makes arms deals for the CIA under the cover of a civilian aid worker.  At Firebase Shkin, aka "The Alamo," Brad Colbert trains Afghani counter-terrorist teams and wonders why he chose to serve.  The men they were meet the men they've become and discover that some things are even more treacherous than the forty klicks of IED-riddled, insurgent-shadowed road that divide them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Road to Ghar Waale

**Author's Note:**

> This story is dedicated to the men and women who have served and are still serving in Afghanistan, especially to the Special Forces of the ISAF, and to all of the post-9/11 warriors, those who have come home and those who never will. We are always in your debt.  
> The characters of Nate Fick and Brad Colbert are fictional, as portrayed in the HBO series _Generation Kill_. No ownership is implied and no implications about real persons are intended. 
> 
> Though this story has been thoroughly researched (see the end notes for resources), it is also a work of fiction. Wherever possible, I have done my best to portray the people of Afghanistan accurately and with respect, but the characters found herein are entirely fictional and subject to the usual rules of narrative. 
> 
> A note on the use of language: For every resource I found on Pashto and Dari, there were differences in spelling and inflection when the language was transliterated into English. I have done my best to use reliable language sources and to minimize confusion. If I have made mistakes, I apologize in advance. Similarly, there are many actual names (of places and organizations, most notably) for which spellings vary. I chose one and tried to be consistent. Your mileage may vary.
> 
> Last but most certainly not least, this story was thoroughly, professionally, and enthusiastically edited by chemm80, without whom I never would have discovered _Generation Kill_ and for whose help, support, encouragement, and enthusiasm I will always be grateful. All remaining mistakes are my own.

**April 13, 2006.  0315 local time.  NW of Firebase Shkin.  Bermel District, Paktika Province, Afghanistan.**

 

The road had begun its life as a goat track and isn’t much more than that now.  Rutted by years of flood and thaw, thousands of hooves and bare feet, it’s murder on the undercarriage of even the most rugged off-roader.  

 

If Nate’s Toyota Hilux was ever meant for off-roading that was a hundred thousand miles ago, and even going fifteen miles an hour, he manages only by luck and assiduous swearing to avoid gutting the undercarriage in the potholes his one working headlight picks out.

 

Of course, it’s suicide to be driving this road in the dark, but then, maybe that’s to his advantage.  If being out here on this road can cement his reputation with the enemy, convincing people he’s either too crazy to be a threat or just crazy enough to be really dangerous, he’ll take it.

 

He’s going to need whatever advantage he can get.

 

**April 12, 2006.  Approx. 1600 local time.  Unnamed village NW of FB Shkin (Unofficially:  Ghar Waale). Bermel District, Paktika Province, Afghanistan.**

 

To the people of Ghar Waale, Nate is simply “Kochai,” or the wanderer.  He shows up one day in early spring, when the snow clings in the deep gash the wadi makes between mountains, in the shadow places where the sun shivers over it only briefly.

 

Ghar Waale isn’t on any map.  The stream after which its people have named their village is wet only part of the year, when the snowmelt from the mountains fills the valley with verdure.

 

The rest of the time it is dry and desolate, and the people scrape their living out of an unforgiving land.  They herd bony goats that give milk for yogurt and cheese and work their hands raw in the hard, rocky earth to plant wheat and alfalfa for fodder and coarse bread.  

 

The constant truths of the people of Ghar Waale are that war will always rage around them and their children will never eat their fill.  If their bellies are swollen, it is from hunger.  Famine stalks the walled homes of Ghar Waale, snatching morsels even from the jaws of starving dogs.

 

So when the stranger comes to them in his battered white truck up the goat trail that serves as their only contact with the world beyond their looming mountains, they don’t ask many questions.

 

Though suspicion has been bred into them by generations of oppression, these people remember the hospitality that is a pillar of their faith and of their ancestors.  This strange white man, so pale and grave, comes with gifts and words.

 

The first they take with thanks.  The second they ignore.  In their long experience, strangers’ words bring nothing but sorrow or betrayal, except on those occasions when they bring both.

 

Nate takes up lodging in a mud-brick hut the back wall of which is the mountain they call Balu, for the way its brown-and-green humped back resembles a charging bear.  That is not the mountain’s name on the map Nate conceals in a heavy plastic pouch he buries in one corner of his dirt-floored hut.  Those names belong to invaders and conquerors, foreign names that the people of Ghar Waale seem stubbornly to ignore.

 

 

They have surrendered everything to strangers in the centuries that there have been people here, but one thing they will never give up, he’s coming to realize, is a collective sense of tired defiance.

 

That defiance can be inconvenient, such as now, when the village elder, Atal, is at his door insisting that Nate come outside.

 

It could be Atal’s way of luring Nate into a sniper’s crosshairs.  Perhaps the people have grown impatient with his perceived meddling in their affairs.  Desperation is sometimes trumped by the remnants of pride, and given the way Atal’s chin juts out and the words Nate can grab from the old man’s garbled, toothless ranting—words like “intruder” and “unwelcome”—he thinks perhaps his time in Ghar Waale is about to come to a premature and quite permanent end.

 

But once outside, Nate sees that Atal has his grandson, Turan, with him, and he relaxes.  Though this might be a lesson for the boy in shotgun diplomacy, Nate thinks it is far more likely that Atal has brought Turan to translate.

 

Turan, Nate has learned, means “brave” in Pashto, and the boy is aptly named.  Perhaps thirteen, Turan is the flower of the village and the promise of its future.  His father, Sohrab, was killed in ’01 by insurgents for getting work as an interpreter at FOB Elroy.  Neither had Turan escaped punishment. Already at eight, he’d been able to speak understandable English, or so Nate’s been told, and that was reason enough for the insurgents to kidnap him and torture him, knocking out his teeth to ease the way for their particular brand of humiliation.

 

But despite the scars at the edges of his mouth, where his lips had been torn and ravaged, and the haunting distance that sometimes troubles his gaze, turning him into an old man much like his grandfather by force of the memories, Turan insists on aiding Nate with his work in the village.

 

Now, he says, “Kochai, sir, grandfather is worried.  There are rumors of bad men in the hills who are watching our village.  Grandfather believes they search for you.  Your name is in the mouths of people over the mountains.”

 

Nate resists the urge to scan the ridgelines to the east and west of his position.  Even if he saw the glint of metal in the trees, he couldn’t do proper reconnaissance.  As far as Turan, Atal, and the rest of the village are concerned, Nate is unarmed, a condition of his neutrality.  His mission is to open lines of communication and trade between Ghar Waale and the greater world and to offer humanitarian aid to the three dozen souls who live here.

 

They think he’s Canadian, neutral by virtue of his mission if not his nationality, a myth he perpetuates by occasionally mimicking the speech patterns of a girl he knew at Dartmouth who hailed from Toronto.  

 

Probably, he does a terrible job of it, but his faux-accent doesn’t seem to faze Turan, the limit of whose exposure to foreigners came when he was ten.  He’d tracked a stray kid too far up Balu and had encountered a team of American soldiers, who had given him candy and shooed him urgently back down the way he’d come.

 

Most of the time, Nate forgets to speak with any accent other than his own.  The rest of the time, he’s mangling Pashto, to the infinite amusement of the villagers.

 

Atal has continued his monologue, making sweeping gestures at the mountain to the west, which the people here had somewhat inexplicably named after a nineteenth century British general.  In their habit of transliterating, it had become “Mt. Palak.”  Every time Nate heard the name, he thought of the spicy chicken and spinach dish his father used to order at the India Palace in Towson and had to swallow away the sudden, tight ache of longing for home.

 

He couldn’t afford to linger over memories of what he’d left behind.

 

The old man’s explanation has at last run its course, his deep-set brown eyes burrowing into Nate’s own, waiting for the stranger to give him some advice.  Atal would never accept an order from Nate, but he often pretends to discount Nate’s suggestions only to later adopt and implement them, presenting them as his own.

 

Nate doesn’t care about face.  He cares about staying alive to complete his mission.  

 

“Tell your grandfather, Turan, that I will let my contacts in Shkin know of the bad men.”  It will mean a trip in the dark through bad guy country, but Nate’s taken that risk before.  Assuming the insurgents aren’t going to move on them tonight, he’ll have just enough time to get to Shkin and back before dawn of the next day. 

 

Dawn is a favorite time for insurgent attacks and roadside ambushes in Bermel District.

 

Turan’s dialogue with his grandfather takes far longer than Nate’s terse suggestion can account for, and he’s not surprised when Turan says, “Grandfather says you should bring us guns and bombs.  We will defend ourselves and drive away the bad men.”

 

Nate thinks that’s a terrible idea.  If the insurgents in the hills are part of the Haqqani Network, trained and armed over the border in Pakistan and coming fresh to the jihad from madrassas in Syria, Chechnya, and Pakistan itself, they’ll overrun Ghar Waale inside of an hour, undoing the six weeks of hard work Nate’s already put in trying to build his mission and killing everyone in sight.  

 

The best hope for Atal’s people is that the insurgents believe the village too insignificant to bother with.  

 

Of course, Nate’s aware—as are Atal and Turan—that his own presence in the village puts them at risk, despite the flag with the international symbol for medical aid, the red cross, prominent on the peak of his hut; the lopsided red crosses painted on the roof and doors of his battered white truck; and the pains he takes to seem innocent and harmless.

 

Too, if the insurgents are watching Ghar Waale because of Nate, his night movements will appear suspicious, and by the very act of seeking support from Firebase Shkin, he might be bringing down the wrath of insurgents who otherwise would have ignored the little village.

 

Uncertain of his own next step but sure that arming Atal’s people is not an option, Nate explains to Turan that he doesn’t have access to weapons, that he couldn’t bring them safely up the goat track even if he had, and that any such action on his part would surely result in the village being attacked.  

 

“Besides,” Nate says, “If I break my agreement with my people, I won’t be able to get the candy you like so much,” he adds, giving Turan a wink.

 

The kid’s twisted lip quirks up into a there-and-then-gone smile before he turns to his grandfather to translate Nate’s concerns.

 

The wrangling isn’t settled until they’ve had a pot of strong tea, crouched around the smoky fire in Atal’s one-room home, his wife, Panra, perched on the threshold grinding wheat for their evening meal.

 

“I’ll go to Shkin,” Nate says, putting some steel into his voice.  “I’ll ask for aid.  But any outside action against the bad men here will bring the village unwanted attention.  You don’t want more eyes on this place.”

 

He hears Turan say, “Amerikaayi,” and knows the kid has understood more than what Nate said with words.  Turan has switched from a wheedling tone to a persistent one, and at last Atal nods, catching Nate’s eye and making a swift, sharp gesture with the flat of his hand.

 

Nate recognizes it for both agreement and dismissal.  “Tell your grandfather I will do what I can,” he asks Turan, and then wishes Atal a good evening, “Gharma mo pə khayr.”  He gives Panra a nod and a smile as he passes her.  She ducks her head shyly but smiles right back.

 

**13 April 2006.  2100 local time. Firebase Shkin, Bermel District, Paktika Province, Afghanistan**

 

“Sir, that road is a clusterfuck every fucking time.”

 

Master Sergeant Brad Colbert’s voice is carefully modulated to express both deep disgust at the general incompetence of the so-called US intelligence community who hold the reins on the teams working out of FB Shkin and his tenuous respect for his current CO, who’s staring at him with a helpless, frustrated expression.

 

“I know that, Colbert,” Captain Mark Taylor avers, shaking his head and wiping a hand over his mouth.  They’re alone in the operations center, but neither of them believes the illusion of privacy the thin plywood walls give them.  They keep their voices low despite their mutual, undirected anger.  “But there’s nothing I can do about it.  It’s strictly need to know.  And we don’t.  Just keep the road open.  That’s the word coming down.”

 

A muscle ticking furiously in his jaw and the tight clench of both fists are the only outward signs the Iceman gives of the inferno of rage and the dousing despair warring for his attention in that moment.

 

Brady is dead.  Cooper is at Bagram awaiting air transport to Germany.  McClintock is a walking, talking time bomb, wound so tight that he might explode at any provocation:  the mess running out of real eggs, for example, or the showers running low on hot water.  And Echeverra’s on emergency family leave, which couldn’t have been more poorly timed for the team or for Echeverra himself.

 

  
The last thing he’d said before he’d climbed into the chopper was, “I’m so sorry.  I want to stay here.”

 

His team’s falling apart, and Brad can’t seem to stop it, and it’s all because of the fucking road between FB Shkin and some no-name shithole in the mountains to the northwest.

 

“Is this about drugs?” Brad hopes to shit it’s not.  The drug trade is a fucking goat rodeo.

 

Taylor’s unhappy eyes sweep Brad’s face, taking in the signs of his sergeant’s slow undoing, and he shrugs.  “Maybe.  Not likely, though.”

 

Brad nods sharply.  “Weapons.”  It’s not a question.  If there’s anything worse than drugs for fucking up a war, it’s the weapons trade.

 

 

Taylor waggles his head, _maybe yes, maybe no_ , but he lets his look linger a little too long on the M4 Brad is cradling like a baby.

 

Message received.

 

“Fuck,” Brad breathes.  “Sir, if they discover Brady’s death is down to American anti-tank missiles or 60 mils, I can’t be held responsible for what I’ll do about it.”

 

Most Improvised Explosive Devices in Afghanistan are devised from Russian mortar rounds or anti-tank mines either from munitions dumps abandoned by the Russians in ’83 or brand spanking new thanks to the arms market the former Soviet states became after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

 

But it also isn’t unknown for shitbag Afganistan National Army officers, NATO’s purported allies, to pad their retirement funds by selling to insurgents the weapons that NATO had given the ANA to defend their own country from said bad guys.

 

“You’ll do what you’re told, Marine,” Taylor barks, but there’s a weariness behind it that speaks of too many months of wading through political bullshit.  He’s starting to drown, Brad senses, and he backs off.  It’s not Taylor’s fault the CIA can’t run things for crap.

 

“Understood,” he answers, nodding.  “Sir.”  It’s not really permission to be dismissed, but Taylor lets him leave, for which Brad is grateful.  They don’t stand on ceremony or recognize rank outside the confines of “secure” buildings on base.  It’s too risky to reveal rank in the field.  But on base, inside the ops center, an officer like Taylor should expect a certain degree of protocol. It’s beyond Brad’s considerable control these days to give a fuck about any of that.

 

The guys who’d served with Brad in OIF wouldn’t recognize him today.  It’s not the first time the thought has crossed his mind, but it is the first time Brad tastes the bitterness of it, the sour, lingering flavor of something in him giving up, rotting away and coming out of him in foul, seeping streams, like a wound gone septic.  In Iraq, even when he’d doubted the rationality of command decisions, he’d never questioned that it was his duty to follow orders.

 

Here, though, at Firebase Shkin, also known as “the Alamo” both for its mud-filled Hesco walls and its quality of being deep in Indian country and widely regarded as the most dangerous place in all of Afghanistan, Brad finds doubt a constant companion.

 

He questions the orders the CIA handlers are handing down to the Counter-Terrorism Pursuit Teams, the CIA’s own private Afghan paramilitary.  Hunter-killers to a man, they come and go like wraiths, dropping intel and souvenirs as proof of their work, and then disappearing once more into the mountains.  

 

He also doubts the veracity of the information coming from prophet spooks, intel the CIA calls “solid,” and he’s even more suspicious of what their interpreters sell them about enemy movements, ambush locations, mined roadways, and a host of other daily details of survival.

 

On occasion—occasions growing both more frequent and longer in duration—Brad asks himself if he can make it, if he’s good enough, if it’s worth the effort for the price he keeps having to pay.

 

He’d liked Brady, goddamnit.  He’d held Brady’s newborn in his arms and smiled at Brady’s beaming wife, Angela, and imagined having the proud papa home for his kid’s first birthday.

 

Brad would like to believe they’re making headway against the enemy, that Brady’s sacrifice will mean a definitive victory over the forces of darkness trying to swallow the country whole.

 

But there’s no stomping out the scum that crawl across Pakistan’s border, attack like berserkers, and then slink back to safety to hide in the rabbit warren of caves in the Hindu Kush and behind the skirts of NATO’s so-called ally, Pakistan.

 

And increasingly, Brad’s coming to understand that nothing can save a country from itself if its own people aren’t going to make a concerted effort.

 

Any country both Britain and the Soviets abandoned probably won’t be tamed even by the combined forces of the ISAF, never mind how many Afghan-trained killers the CIA puts into the field.

 

_Jesus, they’re fucked._

 

The mess is silent and empty when Brad arrives, but there’s always coffee burning on the hot plate, and he doesn’t want to return to his quarters, which might close in on and smother him with his anger and sorrow and frustration and the undefined longing for something he can’t put a name or, god fucking forbid, a face to but that follows him like a stray dog, all hope and conditioned flinching.

 

He doesn’t know how long he’s been sitting there nursing a bitter, cold cup when he’s wrenched from his daze by the sound of boots scuffing purposefully against the wooden floor of the mess.  Whoever has come in is back-lit, so Brad can’t see his face, but he can make out a slim, streamlined build absent of the bulk of body armor.

 

“Sorry,” the guy murmurs.  “Just came to get one for the road.”  He raises an indistinct hand, in which Brad can just make out a plastic travel mug.  

 

“No problem,” Brad answers, gesturing at the coffee station.  “Fair warning, though.  This time of the night, it’s more crude oil than refined premium.”

 

His remark earns him a huff of a laugh, something self-deprecating and strangely familiar in it.  “Sounds about right,” the guy answers, stepping into the band of light cast by the single row of overheads that illuminates the central aisle.

 

Brad’s heart stutters in his chest, and he swears he feels his extremities grow cold.  His eyes scan the hair—longer now, wilder—and the face, filled out with three years’ growth and filthy with road dust, and he can’t bring himself to say a word, despite that Nate Fick has stopped in the aisle and is himself staring as though Brad is a ghost.

 

Nate licks his lips, and Brad tracks the motion, remembering the last time he’d seen that gesture, in Oceanside, a lifetime ago, when he’d followed Nate’s tongue with his own, traced the delicate swell of his upper lip, pushed him against the wall of Gunny Wynn’s back hallway, and at long last put a name to the constant hunger he’d carried with him throughout the whole of OIF.

 

“Master Sergeant Colbert,” Nate says, voice a little strained but absent of surprise.  It’s like he almost expected Brad to be there.  Like he’d known Brad might.

 

“Fancy meeting you here, sir,” Brad manages, pulling on the last of his reserve to keep his voice from breaking over the simple words.  

 

 

Nate takes a step closer, full into the light of one of the unforgiving fluorescents, and Brad sees what age has done to him, the lines it’s added around his mouth, the expression it’s planted in his eyes, which had always betrayed Nate’s true feelings to Brad.

 

Those eyes used to say _want_ and _need_ and _can’t_.

 

Now, they mostly say _tired_.  Brad feels something in his chest clench, feels a tight ache riding his diaphragm, and he has to remind himself to breathe.

 

“What brings you to our lovely corner of hell, sir?”  Brad asks then, his voice rough.  He refuses to clear his throat.  It’s a sign of weakness, and he’s already feeling all of the other effects of same.

 

Nate shakes his head, a wryness quirking one corner of his chapped lips.  “Not a ‘sir’ anymore, Brad.  You can call me Nate, you know.”

 

Brad hears Bravo 2 in Gunny Wynn’s backyard, raucous with tequila and the relief of having survived the sandbox.  Through the walls, they’d sounded happy, untouchable, and so fucking young.  There in the dubious shelter of the hallway, Nate’s solid length pressed against his own, his mouth had been saying, “I’m retired, Brad.  You can call me Nate.”

 

With the phantom of Nate’s lips against his throat just beneath his ear, where Nate had whispered damp and dirty words into Brad’s skin, Brad rises, guns his paper cup toward the trash can, and moves out from where the bench keeps him pinned to the edge of the mess table.

 

He needs to be out in the open for this conversation, somewhere where the lines of egress are clear.  Another thing his latest tour of Afghanistan has taught him is the value of strategic retreat.

 

“You didn’t answer my question, _Nate_ ,” Brad pursues, closing the distance between them enough that if he stretched out his arm, his fingers would brush Nate’s chest.

 

“I’m a civilian aid worker,” Nate offers.

 

They both know the words mean next to nothing.

 

“Spook?” Brad hazards, and Nate curls his lips into a dry smirk.  

 

“Do I seem the spy type to you, Brad?”

 

Brad thinks of the stealthy way Nate had sneaked his fingers into Brad’s waistband that night, the way he’d hollowed out a place between Brad’s fly and his hard flesh.  The way his fingers had curled around Brad, pulling sounds from him that Nate had secreted in the cavern of his hot, wet mouth, sucking them from his tongue as he wrenched an orgasm from him.

 

“Not an answer,” Brad prods.

 

“I work for the Canadian branch of Medecins sans Frontieres,” Nate says, setting off Brad’s bullshit detector.

 

“You went to med school?”  Brad does the math.  No way Nate’s already a doctor.

 

Nate confirms Brad’s suspicion with a shake of his head.  “No.  My job is to come ahead of the medical team and set up an infrastructure in more remote regions.  I make friends with the locals, find interpreters, figure out supply routes, get the lay of the land.”

 

“Bait the enemy,” Brad adds.  He’s not proud of the way some part of him fills with gloating heat when Nate flinches at Brad’s assessment.  It’s the first sign of discomfort Nate’s shown.  He wants to strip away Nate’s veneer of calm, wants to take this conversation off the cover story page Nate’s apparently got it on.  

 

He restrains himself with a deep breath and a reminder that Nate was once his…What?  Not friend.  They were never precisely friends.  They were commander and subordinate and then they were swallowed groans and the velvet weight of Nate’s cock against Brad’s palm and Nate’s wet mouth against his throat and then they were three thousand miles and separate lifetimes apart.

 

“You were going to Harvard.  Writing a book.”

 

Another head shake, and this time Nate glances down, as if he can’t quite make eye contact with Brad for this next part.  “Decided it wasn’t for me.  Too much liberal, dick-suck whining and mental masturbation.  Guy can only take so many references to Kierkegaard before he starts fantasizing about putting a bullet in someone’s brain.”

 

Brad wonders how much of that little speech was rehearsed and how much of it is based on reality.  He can’t see Nate giving in to even a fantasy of lost control.  Not the Nate he thought he’d known, the Nate who had pushed Brad away, cleaned himself up with the tail of his shirt, tucked it in, zipped up, and said, “This can’t happen again.”

 

Brad hadn’t even had time to regain his breath before Nate had brushed his fingers over the back of Brad’s hand, the one still sticky with Nate’s come, and then disappeared through the kitchen and out to the backyard, where he’d been swallowed up by the revelry.

 

“So you thought, what?  Afghanistan is lovely this time of year?  Can’t get enough bureaucratic bullshit, so I’ll join the international aid community?”  Brad’s voice expresses clearly that he thinks Nate’s explanation is a load of horseshit.

 

“Why are _you_ here, Brad?”  Nate’s tone is deceptively mild, but Brad can hear underneath a thread of exhaustion and something else, something he might’ve once called need, except that Nate had shown exactly how little he needed Brad three years and a thousand missed opportunities ago.

 

“I go where the Marines send me.”  They both know that’s bullshit.  No one is assigned to FB Shkin without having gained a shitload of specialized skills and signed enough paperwork to promise his first- and second-born to the tender mercies of Uncle Sam.

 

“CTPT?”  

 

Brad shrugs.  He was a trainer for a while there, but, “What you don’t know can’t be tortured out of you.”  

 

He’s trying for light, but his words have a different effect.  An expression catches the corner of Nate’s eye, not a wince but a recognition, a memory snagging him.  His hand around the travel mug tightens a fraction of an ounce of pressure, and Brad traces a subtle shudder across the skin exposed at the throat of Nate’s tee-shirt.

 

Jesus, he doesn’t want to think about why Nate is reacting to Brad’s words.  There are only two possibilities.  Brad’s ashamed to say he prefers the idea that Nate has borne witness to the victims of torture and not himself been under the knife.

 

Nate turns away, toward the coffee station.  Brad knows deflection when he sees it, and something flips in his gut.  It’s the second option, then.

 

“How long you been in-country?” Brad asks, handing Nate three sugar packets.

 

Nate’s eyes crinkle, and the first real smile breaks across his face at the fact that Brad remembers how he takes his coffee.  The smile is thin and worn but genuine, and Brad feels a warm spot glowing behind his breastbone.

 

_Fucked.  Totally fucked._

 

“Seven weeks.”

 

Nate’s turned away, looking down at where he’s muddying the black brew with dried creamer, and Brad knows with every ounce of his Recon-honed skills that Nate’s lying through his perfect white teeth.

 

“You?”

 

“Five months.”  154 days, to be exact.  Not that Brad’s counting.

 

“Where are you working?” Brad asks, but even before Nate answers, he has a sudden chill presaging what he’s going to hear.

 

Nate huffs another laugh.  “Tiny little village about forty-five klicks northwest of here.  Isn’t on a map.  The locals call it—.”

 

“Ghar Waale,” Brad finishes, pinning Nate with a hard look.  “I’m familiar with it.”

 

Nate gives Brad a hard look of his own, suspicion tightening the corners of his eyes and mouth.  “We haven’t had outside contact since I’ve been there.  No one comes down that sorry excuse for a road.”

 

“Who do you think keeps that road open, Nate?”

 

Brad watches the penny drop, watches Nate rearrange his assumptions, hand frozen on the red plastic stir stick, other hand crushing the empty sugar packets.  Even as Nate’s eyes search for a trash can, Brad can see him re-evaluating what he understands of the situation, assessing how he can work the angles of this latest intel.

 

When he looks up to meet Brad’s steady gaze, his face is a mask of careful neutrality.  “Thanks for that, Master Sergeant.”  The rank is meant to remind Brad of their relative position in the here and now.  It’s meant to put distance between them.

 

Brad should shrug it off, make a joke about it being his job, throw in an insult about Nate being a lame-ass POG these days, but he can’t.  Brady’s blood still paints the inside of his eyelids.  Cooper’s screams still ring in his ears.  The cost has been too high for Brad to let Nate get away with evasion, to let him walk out of the mess and back into the devouring darkness without a better explanation for what they’ve all paid.

 

“Orders,” Brad says, word sharp and short, refusing Nate’s hollow gratitude.  What he means is: _We didn’t do it for you._

 

“What I’m wondering, sir,” Brad continues, laconic tone just this side of mocking, “Is how an aid station in a shitstain, no-name village in the middle of buttfuck nowhere rates the almost constant attention of a dedicated Marine patrol to keep its supply line open.  Especially,” and he adds it as a challenge, almost spitting the words, “When not even a single medical aid worker has made an appearance.”

 

He’s violating a shitload of regulations by giving up even that much information to an alleged civilian.  But if Nate’s actually an aid worker, Brad will eat his M4 and reassemble it when it comes out the other end.

 

Nate’s gaze doesn’t flicker by so much as a millimeter.  He quirks up one corner of his mouth in a dry smirk that anyone else might buy but that Brad recognizes as part of the same mask Nate’s been wearing this whole time.

 

“It’s not my place to question the vagaries of ISAF,” Nate answers, one shoulder rising and falling in what looks like a casual shrug.  Brad knows a defensive move when he sees one, though.  “I’m just here to do my part.”

 

“Bullshit,” Brad says, but he doesn’t push it, so overcome with a sudden urge to lay hands on Nate, to choke him or fuck him or both, to shove his cock down Nate’s throat until Nate’s eyes stream with tears or to push into him from behind, Nate’s pants around his knees hobbling him, wrists trapped in Brad’s hands, helpless and desperate as Brad tears a plea out of him.

 

The images are visceral and savage, and Brad blinks, trying to shake the feeling of Nate struggling beneath his pinning weight.  He comes back to the moment to see Nate’s eyes, gratifyingly wide, mask slipping as he watches Brad’s hands clench and unclench, sees the flush rising up his neck and painted across his cheeks.  Sees Nate _see_ what Brad is imagining.

 

Nate swallows visibly and Brad’s eyes fasten on the fragile apple of his throat.  Nate lets go of a breath of sound, a broken-off word or a helpless noise, something Brad wants to hear again and louder.  Then he squares his shoulders and slips the mask down over his features, offering Brad a bland and pleasant look that means exactly nothing.

 

“I’ve got to get back on the road.  Have to make Ghar Waale before dawn.”

 

Brad’s painfully familiar with the pre-dawn conditions of the narrow defile along which that particular road crawls.   It’s one long kill zone, narrow, hemmed in on both sides by ridges, so rutted even a Humvee can’t make any reasonable speed. 

 

Just as suddenly as the rage had come upon him, fear coats Brad in a cold sweat.  There’s no way Nate should be on that road at night.  Or ever.  He wants to offer to escort Nate, which is ridiculous—Nate’s hardly a damsel in distress, and anyway, Brad can’t just take a Humvee outside the wire, not without permission and a reason a damned sight better than the one he’d have to offer.

 

That he’s even thinking of volunteering to drive the road to Ghar Waale at night wrings an ugly, self-deprecating laugh out of him.  Had it been only an hour or so ago he’d been bitching to Captain Taylor about having to police that road?

 

_He’s so fucked._

 

He doesn’t say, _Be careful_.  Or _Take care_.  Or, worse, _Stay here_.  Brad Colbert might be pretty far gone, might finally have found a face for that unnamed longing he’d been trying to avoid by coming to the mess in the first place, but he hasn’t entirely lost his mind.

 

Whatever Nate’s really doing at Ghar Waale, Brad’s sure that the other man is aware of the risks and prepared for every possibility.  No one was ever better at the subtleties of situational assessment than Nate Fick.  No one else had ever earned the degree of trust Nate had gotten from Brad back in the sandbox.

 

Never mind that he and Nate had dismantled that trust and left it to rust in the salty air of Oceanside.

 

The man in front of him tonight shares at least as much of the old Nate as Brad carries of the person he was before they’d undone one another in a darkened hallway.

 

“I’ll be seeing you, sir,” Brad says instead, turning away first, walking away with his back straight and shoulders squared.  If his step stutters a little to take in the white Toyota truck parked two buildings down, the sagging suspension, the bullet-riddled fender, the rust bleeding streaks down the rear quarter panel…if his feigned calm suffers in that moment, well, at least Nate doesn’t see it.  

 

**14 April 2006.  0421 local time. Unnamed village NW of FB Shkin.  Bermel District, Paktika Province, Afghanistan.**

 

Dawn is just painting a grey line along the ridge above his hut when Nate pulls his truck to a stop and lets out the breath he’s been figuratively holding since he left FB Shkin five and a half hours ago.

 

It had been a mostly wasted journey, if he leaves out the fact that he saw Brad, something he’s spent the long drive trying—and failing—not to think about.  He hadn’t expected, nor truth be told wanted, help from Captain Mendez, his military contact and second-in-command of the CTPT program at the firebase.  A platoon or team showing up in Ghar Waale would sign a death warrant for every man, woman, and child in the village.

 

No, he’d gone mostly because he’d told Atal he would and also because he’d wanted to send an encoded message from the scrambled line left open and reserved for such messages.  He’d reported on the alleged insurgent activity in the vicinity of the village and let his handler know what Nate was planning next.

 

Now, what he most wants is a cold beer, a hot shower, and a long, long nap.  Since there’s no refrigeration, alcohol, hot water, or decent beds in Ghar Waale, he’ll have to make do.  Good thing he was a Marine.

 

His relief at being “home” is short-lived.  The door to his hut yawns wide, not the state he left it in, and Nate’s reaching under the seat for one of his many hidden weapons when Turan stumbles over the threshold and into the unsteady, weak beam of the truck’s one working headlight.

 

He’s holding something folded in one shaking hand, and blood streams from a wound on his forehead.

 

Nate abandons the gun, shoulders open his door, not bothering to shut off the ignition or kill the headlight.  It’s stupid and dangerous—he’s making a clear target of them both—but Turan’s lost expression, the blood, the way the ordinarily unshakeable boy is trembling, all of it undoes Nate’s careful training, his typical circumspection.

 

His hands frame the boy’s thin shoulders as he gazes into his face, looking for wounds, eyes searching out evidence of further damage.

 

“Mr. K,” Turan stutters, hand with the paper in it coming up to show it to Nate.  “They left this for you.  Told me to give it to you when you come.”

 

Nate ignores the paper for the moment, using one hand to tilt Turan’s face into the light.  The boy winces, shying away from Nate’s touch, and Nate goes cold when he remembers why it is that Turan doesn’t like anyone restraining him.

 

He lets go like the boy’s skin has burned him, says, “I’m sorry, Turan,” in Pashto.  He takes the note and opens it, holds it in the cloudy light to examine the scrawl of black figures, right to left.  It’s in Pashto, that much he recognizes, but though Nate cannot read more than a few words of the language, he already knows what the note says.

 

Turan translates without looking at the paper.

 

“The Western infidel will die for the glory of Allah.  There is one god, and He is great.  In His name we will bathe in the blood of the infidel.  We will open his throat and cut out his lying tongue.”

 

Such delicate, beautiful script for such ugly and awful words.  

 

It’s a night letter, in the local parlance, the first of a series of death threats Nate can expect before the writer visits him to carve into his flesh the fate the words promise.

 

“Will you come inside and let me look at your head?” Nate makes it a question, not an order.  Turan is shivering, a subtle, pervasive vibration of skin.

 

Turan shakes his head, and the blood streaming from his forehead traces delicate figures across his cheek.  “I go home,” he answers at last, turning dazedly toward his grandfather’s house.

 

Nate watches until the boy enters the illusory safety of Atal’s home before he shuts the truck off, kills the headlight, and retrieves from beneath the front passenger seat the foreign service pistol he’d been reaching for initially.  He pulls a flashlight from the glove-box and turns it on, piercing the darkness of his hut but keeping the gun low against his thigh, mindful that there are probably eyes on him.  He doesn’t want the enemy to know he’s armed, wants to maintain the illusion of innocence as long as he can, though he suspects that horse has already left the barn, given the letter crinkling quietly in his pants pocket with every cautious step he takes.

 

The inside of his hut is trashed.  The globes of his kerosene lanterns are broken, the wicks yanked from them, the fuel spilled across the floor.  His meager pottery—plate, teapot, cup—is shattered against the hearth, his one chair broken to kindling and left in a mocking pile, as though a helpful elf had provided him with firewood.  The corner where he’d buried his map and more weapons is undisturbed, however, and the only papers he’d had on the table (also broken to kindling)—requisition forms, situation reports, personnel recommendations, all on MSF letterhead—are torn into confetti and scattered like black-and-white snow across the remains of his mattress, which is tattered to feathery shreds in the corner.

 

After stowing the gun behind a loose hearthstone, Nate sighs and turns to the work of putting his house to rights, but the work is merely mechanical, an excuse for something to do while his tired mind turns over this latest hitch in his mission parameters.  

 

The night letter is a bad sign; it means there’s scrutiny not only on him but on the village.  That the messenger had roughed up Turan is no coincidence.  A threat against the village elder’s grandson is the clearest message the enemy will offer.  It says that they will have no mercy on any who shelter the “infidel.”

 

It says that Nate’s presence here threatens everyone.

 

He’d known that before he’d come; it had always been a possibility of this type of mission.

 

There’s only one way to keep the boy safe, and it isn’t by inviting Brad and his team to police the village.

 

No, Nate has to step up his own game, a game very different from—and in some ways a great deal more dangerous than—Brad’s.  

 

Nate moves to the corner of his hut, disturbs the earth there until he can pry up the hidden boards, and reaches into the dark hole to pull out a sheaf of currency and a stack of glossy 8 X 10 photographs, the manufacturer’s brand name stamped in gold embossed letters in the lower left corner of each.

 

There are desert backdrops and mountains in the distance, and the M203s, RPG-7s, and anti-tank batteries are posed like centerfold models, their sleek and lethal lines shown to best advantage in the rugged theaters where they’ll most likely be put to use.

 

His hand reaches into the hole for one more thing, a battered black passport, the lion, unicorn, crown, and shield rubbed to a dull, tarnished yellow.  The name inside is legible, though:  Nicholas Frazier, from Toronto, Ontario.  A younger image of himself stares back at Nate, eyes flat, giving nothing away.  The pages are littered with stamps from countries to which he’s never actually been.

 

He remembers at the beginning of the war how Americans going abroad would wear maple leaf pins on their backpacks and tee-shirts, claim Canadian citizenship to avoid taking criticism for US foreign policy.  Nate had felt those people were in some way betraying their country, by their minor acts of cowardice allowing the terrorists to gain ground.

 

There’s irony, then, in Nate’s Canadian identity, but what might once have made him bitter now only makes him tired. 

 

Fingering the passport, Nate considers how he’d hoped to avoid having to do this so soon.  He’d wanted to establish himself further in the village, begin putting together an actual medical aid station, make friends with the local tribal chiefs.  But Nate knows now that the enemy has stepped up the pace of this encounter, and if he hopes to complete his mission, he’s going to have to move up his schedule of contacts.  Haste more often means death than victory, but he hasn’t got a choice.

 

Nate won’t let Turan and Atal and the rest die a needless, awful death for him.  

 

If it means he dies instead, well, Nate’s already accepted that.

 

He’s tired enough that his hand shakes as he shoves the passport, currency, and photos into a rucksack, adding a bottle of iodine-purified water to the outside pocket and throwing in the flashlight still sitting on the hearth next to the hide.

 

He conceals the hide, rises wearily, and moves back outside.  The sun is a diffuse pink light steaming up from the ridgelines to either side of the narrow wadi.  Fog effuses from the stream, casting a scrim over the brilliant purple of a native flowering shrub that grows dense and fragrant along the stream’s banks.  The bellwether goat minces by, heading for the house of Roshan, the boy who tends the village’s herd.

 

Nate can see the skinny kid standing in his doorway.  He sketches a wave, and Roshan waves vigorously back, a smile lighting up his narrow face.  Roshan has deep-set black eyes and long, lush lashes that would put a beauty queen’s to shame.  He’s swift and clownish, loves to play soccer, and can often be found with a kid slung over his neck like a living scarf.  His sister, Laila, peaks out at Nate from behind her brother’s khat, her eyes as bright as her brother’s smile.  She ducks behind her brother when Nate toodles his fingers at her.

 

He feels a swell of protectiveness, a sense of responsibility that almost smothers him in its intensity, and then reminds himself that his real mission will save hundreds of Lailas, thousands of Roshans from the ravages of war in their country.

 

Some days, he can even believe his own propaganda.  Today, he’s worn down by exhaustion and by the residual tension of the way he left things with Brad.

  
_Brad._

 

Jesus, Nate had known it was a possibility he might see Brad again, knew Brad was stationed at the Alamo, but Nate really hadn’t expected to run into him like that.  Some part of him had been happy to live in denial.

 

Where Brad’s concerned, Nate is still a fool.

 

With effort, Nate dismisses that train of thought and turns his eyes toward the hillside to the east and then the west, stretching his hands above his head as though he’s working out the stiffness of a good night’s rest.

  
He wishes.  

 

In fact, he’s looking for the glint of early morning sun on muzzles or scopes, for movement where there should be none, any sign that he’s being watched.  

 

Other than a persistent itch between his shoulder blades, there is no indication that the bad guys are in the hills around Ghar Waale.

 

His lack of observable evidence means nothing, though.  Colonel Mendez had confirmed what Atal had told Nate yesterday, had given Nate transcripts of translated SAT chatter the prophets had netted over the past three days.

 

There are definitely bad guys in the hills.

 

_Good_ , Nate thinks.  _The better to watch me make first contact_.

 

As he drives north up the road, passing on the narrow, rutted goat track between the village houses, Nate waves at the people of Ghar Waale.

 

Some smile and wave back, chattering in rapid Pashto.

 

Some stare with blank eyes, faces giving nothing away.

 

A few scowl and make gestures with their fingers—whether warding off evil or inviting that it come to him individually, Nate can’t say.  

 

Mostly, though, he’s been welcomed here.  He’d almost prefer they didn’t let them into their homes so easily, share their meager meals, invite him to play with their children and look at their few, precious heirlooms.  It makes it harder to lie to them as he has been.

 

Makes it harder to know how much danger he’s putting them all in.

 

Still, he drives through smiling, and heads north, to where the track squeezes through a narrow defile between two low knees of Mounts Balu and Palak and then widens into a sun-washed wadi.  Here, the range of mountains spreads away from the valley.  The soil has already been turned for crops, and ancient irrigation systems engineered by farmers in Alexander’s time await more rainfall.  

 

Past the fields, the road narrows once more, plunging down a steep fold in the land and working its way by slow, steep-shouldered switchbacks up the other side of a ravine.  It takes Nate the better part of an hour to coax his truck up the far side of the cut, but that gives him time to think about what’s to come.

 

He’s been cultivating contacts among the insurgents since he arrived in Ghar Waale seven weeks ago.  Ostensibly surveying the region for good landing zones and possible hospital sites, he’s in fact been trying to make contact with a disaffected splinter group of the Haqqani Network calling itself “The Right Hand of Allah.”

 

Its leader goes by the unlikely Pashtun name Shahzar, but he is almost certainly a foreign jihadist.  Scant intel suggestions that Shahzar didn’t like sharing a lieutenancy with the chief of a rival tribe, but Nate suspects it had more to do with Shahzar’s real political agenda than to any kind of internecine grudge.

 

Whatever Shahzar’s motives, he needs guns to keep his fledgling army in the terrorism game, and that’s where Nate—or rather, Nicholas Frazier—comes in.

 

The cover is solid enough for the remote folds of the Hindu Kush, where the most sophisticated of the enemy have SAT phones and sporadic internet access, none of it secure from Western prophet spooks who haunt the frequencies, mining information and muddying the chatter with misdirection.

 

Nick Frazier is an unrepentant warmonger, the kind jihadist propaganda loves to fashion from tabloid magazine images and Tom Clancy novels.  A Canadian by birth, his passport suggests he’s been to all the hottest places for an arms trader hoping to make a big score:  Sudan, Mali, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chechnya, Uzbekistan, northern Spain.  

 

Everywhere he’s gone, he’s dealt death on the small scale, picking at the bleeding edges of ethnic conflicts and civil strife like a vulture stealing meat from wolves’ mouths.  Now, with Afghanistan experiencing some of the worst fighting since ’81, Nick’s moved into the most contentious region of the nation to take advantage of the chaos and carve out his own little corner of a gunpowder paradise.

 

That’s the story he’s been giving one-legged lackeys and cringing janissaries for weeks now.  At last, just six days ago, it had netted him a meeting with Gul Rang, who claims to be Shahzar’s second-in-command.  

 

The man’s rank is doubtful, but he’d seemed better dressed and better armed than the others Nate had had to suffer through, and when he’d named a time and place, there’d been enough avid greed in his eyes to suggest that he was either hoping to ambush Nate and torture the location of the weapons cache out of him or that he would be rewarded for making a lucrative and useful connection for Shahzar.

 

Possibly both.

 

Nate figures he’s got a fifty-fifty chance of ending his day under a moldy hood in a cold, high cave somewhere, but he’s gone into better situations that turned out to have had worse odds, so he refuses to worry.

 

Still, he’d have felt a hell of a lot better about it if there’d been a message from his handler when he’d stopped at FB Shkin last night.  No news is rarely good news in his particular line of work.

 

Sighing, Nate cajoles the Toyota around the last sharp turn, shimmies through the unmistakable crater left by an exploded mortar round, and eases to a stop on a rock-strewn plateau.  Before him is a white Toyota Hilux dual-axel truck with an extended cab, the much bigger brother of the model he himself is driving.  It’s parked at an angle blocking the road to the north, and its bed is occupied by two men, one of whom is training the barrel of an RPG-7 on him.  The other is holding his AK-47 to his chest while he leans down to light a cigarette.

 

The guy’s nonchalance suggests confidence, not incompetence.  It does nothing to make Nate feel better about his chances of surviving the meet.

 

He hops out of his truck, though, like he’s not at all concerned about the sniper rifles undoubtedly trained on him from hides halfway up the ridge to the east or the guys who appear behind him to flank him from the cover of his own truck-bed.

 

Instead, he keeps his hands out in the open, keeps his eyes on the rear driver’s side door, and stops halfway between his truck and theirs, waiting, a pleasantly indifferent expression on his face and a posture that says _I’ve got all the time in the world_.

 

The man who climbs out of the backseat of the Hilux is a couple of inches shorter and at least thirty pounds heavier than Nate, but he carries the weight like he’s earned it the hard way, like it’s muscle, not fat.  His skin is fair, his beard chestnut brown speckled here and there with brilliant silver, and his eyes are a mossy green.

 

Nate pegs him for Syrian, or maybe Yemeni.  No way he’s Afghani.

 

He speaks to Nate in stilted Pashto, eliding the syllables in the manner of a native Arabic speaker, and when Nate manages, “I have no Pashto,” in his own painful burr, the man makes a sharp gesture at the dualie and a slender figure emerges from the rear to glide to a halt two paces behind the man.

 

Nate catches a glimpse of kohl-rimmed eyes, the gleam of soft gold in the boy’s ears, the light, clear sound of bangles at his ankles.  He has to hide his revulsion and a sudden desire to throttle the man, who has barked an instruction to the boy.

 

The boy, no more than eleven or twelve—a little younger, maybe, than Turan—takes a hesitant step forward, eyes downcast, and says in a sweet, high voice, “The most honored Shahzar welcomes you.”

 

Nate knows that it’s rude to look at the boy and not his master, but it might be among the hardest things he’s ever done to raise his eyes and respond in the polite and expected way to Shahzar.

 

“I am honored to meet the great man Shahzar.”  It’s the standard formula he’s learned over the years.  Flatter the mark, make him think he’s special and important, tease him with a taste of what’s to come, and encourage him to imagine what his life will be like once he’s got what Nick is selling.

 

Throw in a meal sure to give him intestinal bugs and three and a half hours’ worth of deceit and haggling, and you’ve got Nate’s schedule for the day.

 

Shahzar surprises him by listening to the boy’s translation, making an impatient slashing motion with his left hand, and rattling off what is obviously a series of questions.  He never looks directly at Nate, and his upper lip curls scornfully as he makes his demands.

 

The boy’s voice is less assured as he says, “The most honored Shahzar, the Right Hand of Allah, praised be His name, wishes to know what you offer.  What the caliber?  Have you RPGs?  Anti-tank?”

 

Before Nate can answer, Shahzar is speaking again, pointing at the RPG-7 in the back of his truck and then around them at the ground.  Nate’s eyes track the path of his finger, picking out the places where the dirt and stone are too regular.

 

The place is ringed in mines.

 

“The most honored Shahzar wishes to know where you keep the weapons.”

 

Nate’s sure the fucker would love to know that information, but this is neither Nate nor Nick’s first jihad rodeo.

 

He smiles, an expression that he intends to be unpleasant, and shakes his head once, a short, sharp jerking of his chin.

 

“No,” he says, and that’s a clear enough word in any language.  “Give me your order.  I’ll give you a delivery date and arrange the pick-up with you.  You bring the money, I’ll bring the weapons.”

 

The boy doesn’t look at his master as he translates Nate’s rejoinder, but he’s already schooled himself not to flinch when Shahzar strikes the boy hard with the flat of his hand, his expression suggesting that there will be more harm to the boy for every refusal Nate gives.

 

Nate clenches his jaw and lets his smile slide into something slick and nasty.

 

“The weapons aren’t in-country.  No one here can be trusted with such things.”  It’s a dangerous insult.  It’s one thing to be culturally deceitful; it’s another for an outsider to point it out.  “When you are ready to deal, you know how to find me.  Until then, do not waste my time.  And hope that I don’t make a different bargain before you get around to making a decision.”

  
He’s bluffing, of course.  If word got out that the Westerner living in Ghar Waale had weapons for sale, the bad guys in the mountains—men that would make Shahzar’s little army look like puling infants—would take Nate and wring his life’s history out of him over the course of long days, weeks…a month or more.

 

Nate knows.

 

He can’t let any of that show, though, not here, not now.  Not ever, in this land of blank sky and endless rock.  He has to be hard like the mountains to survive the place.

 

Nate doesn’t wait for the trembling boy to finish translating, turning sharply on his heel and moving toward his truck, motions balancing on the knife-edge between life-saving haste and necessary savoir faire.  The men blocking the rear of his truck are expressionless as they train their AK-47s on him.  In his head, he’s seeing the damage a 7.62 can do at this range.

 

“Wait.”

 

The boy’s voice is tremulous but carrying.

 

“My master will hear what you have to say.”  

 

Nate continues walking.

 

“Please!”

 

Working such missions as Nick Frazier has taken a lot away from Nate—his spleen (that was a fun two weeks in Nigeria), his faith in humanity, even the remotest chance of a full night’s sleep—but it hasn’t so far undone him that he can resist the naked despair in the boy’s voice.

 

When he turns around, Shahzar has a hand tangled in the boy’s hair and is making a show of pulling his neck back, exposing the slender, delicate throat.

 

“You like?”

 

His accent is thick, but Nate wouldn’t need Shahzar’s terrible English to understand his horrific words.

 

Nate shakes his head.  “Not my type.” 

 

“Too bad.”  Shahzar shrugs, shoves the boy away, laughs when he stumbles and falls to his hands and knees.  He gives an order, and the boy obeys, head hanging between his shaking elbows, tears dripping into the dust of the road.

 

The man barks another order, and this time the second gunman in Shahzar’s truck responds, leaping gracefully from the bed and walking over to them both, AK-47 thrust in front of him like the deadliest game of show-and-tell.

 

From his place on the ground, the boy says, “Do you have more of these?”

 

Nate shrugs.  “Better.  M-4s.  Ten to a case.”  

 

“And RPG-7s.”  That word needs no translating.  It’s universal. “They come one to a crate.”

 

He points to the nearest anti-tank mine, says, “Six to a case.”

 

“Grenades, M203s, SAWs,” he ticks them off in a bored, showroom voice.  With practiced ease, he pulls the glossies where they’ve been tucked into his rear waistband, ignoring the way his motion makes everyone tense up, fingers hovering over their triggers.

 

Shahzar’s gunman takes the photos and uses the boy’s back as a table.  It’s barely enough surface for two of the pictures side by side, but then, he’s not doing it to be practical.

 

Nate struggles to ignore the cruelty, reminds himself that Nick Frazier is a bottom-feeding sociopath who’d sooner slit the kid’s throat himself than lose a wink of sleep over the boy’s plight.

 

It works long enough to rough out the details of the next meeting, which won’t be the exchange itself but a demonstration—Nick’s chance to lure Shahzar with gifts.

 

Satisfied that he’s gotten about all he’s going to get, Nate waves away the photos as the gunman collects them and tries to give them back.  “More where they came from.”

 

The boy’s allowed up to translate their farewells, and Nate at last moves back toward his truck, the two men there ghosting away into the trees.  

 

Shahzar stands by his truck and watches Nate make a six-point turn to reverse direction without hitting any of the mines.  The guy on the RPG-7 is laughing, saying something to the gunman with the AK-47 who’s still on the ground.

 

In his rearview, Nate sees Shahzar cuff the boy in the back of the head and force him into the back of the truck cab.  He tears his eyes away to pay attention to the tricky turn at the top of the first switchback, feeling both grateful and cowardly for the excuse.

 

**14 April 2006.  0610 local time.  FB Shkin.  Bermel District, Paktika Province, Afghanistan.**

 

Brad’s team is down three and without transport, but they’re on patrol today, riding with Lieutenant McGivens, Sergeant Suarez, and Lance Corporal Nguyen.

  
Taylor has promised that he’ll get Brad’s team back to full strength and out on its own, but Brad’s not holding his breath.  The region’s reputation for danger is well-earned; in the five months and change that he’s been in Paktika Province, there have already been three US fatalities.  Brady makes the fourth.  

 

To the people back home, it might not seem like a very high number.

 

The people back home don’t know shit.

 

Shrugging off the tension crawling across his shoulders, Brad eyes Will McClintock where he sits by himself in the mess and wonders if he’s going to make it through another patrol without cracking.  

 

Will’s a farm-fed Iowa kid, twenty-two, broad like an ox across the shoulders and with a smile like slow-pour molasses, sweet and spreading.

 

Or he was.

 

Lately, his eyes have taken on the flat, blinkless stare of some deep sea creature, cold and absent of anything but an interest in eating whatever it can catch.  Turned on a hapless sorority queen back home, it’d raise screams fit to bring down the roof.

 

Here, it blends right in.

 

But Brad mourns Will’s warmer smile, the way he used to laugh at shit that Brady would come up with, riffing off of something he read on the internet.  His Paris Hilton impression had been legendary, bringing the kinds of giggles out of Will that would make even Brad lose his hard-won composure, at least enough to crack his tan with a smile.

 

Five months they’d made it without any serious injury—bullet grazes and shrapnel like candy corn under the skin of their forearms doesn’t count—and three days ago they’d struck an IED not three klicks from Shkin’s front gate.

 

Will blamed himself; as the gunner, he should’ve seen the trigger.

 

Brad knows that kind of guilt does no one any good, and he says as much to Will while the kid’s still got Brady’s blood growing tacky on his pant-leg.  It hadn’t registered then, and now Brad fears the kid’s too far gone.  He’s not sure if Will is going to lose his shit and loose a stream of death on the next enemy to show his face or go still and silent, frozen in place, and find a bullet to take care of his pain.

 

Taylor nods sympathetically when Brad stops at his table to express his concern, but the Captain shakes his head anyway, “I can’t, Brad.  We’re too light as it is and we need a team out on that road.  Lieutenant McGivens needs Will on the .50.”

 

He leaves it unsaid that McGivens doesn’t technically need Brad.  He’s got an NCO already.  Brad’s the fifth wheel, not McClintock.

 

“Yessir,” Brad answers, not really disappointed; he’s learned that not having expectations to begin with is the best way to avoid that feeling.

 

Will follows him out of the mess, fastening his Kevlar as he walks.  

 

“How you doin’ today, Will?”  Brad keeps his tone light; he doesn’t want to poke the hive.

 

Will shrugs.  “Okay, sir, I guess.”

 

“You fine working the .50?”

 

“Yessir.” 

 

 And that’s all the conversation they manage before they have to report to McGivens.

 

_God, he’s young_ , is the first—and unhelpful—observation Brad makes.  McGivens can’t be more than twenty-four or twenty-five, fresh-faced and fucking freckled, the creases in his MCCUUs barely broken in by hard use.

 

His eyes are, blessedly, a muddy brown, and judging from his eyebrows, his hair is that color, too.  He looks nothing at all like Nate Fick.

 

But every lieutenant since OIF has had to live up to one standard, and with a sinking feeling in his already queasy stomach (damned reconstituted egg slop), Brad realizes McGivens is going to fall short, too.

 

If anything survives of Brad Colbert, circa 2003, it’s his ability to take orders—even bullshit orders—and make do.  Taylor gave him an order; Brad will follow it.

 

He’s even willing to give McGivens the benefit of the doubt, if only because Cheesy Suarez, McGivens’ NCO, is a good man.

 

Suarez’s real first name is Jesus, rhymes with Hey-Seuss, but ever since the first grade, when the only white boy in his class called him “Cheesus” in a failed attempt at being an upstart cracker, Suarez has been known as “Cheese” or “Cheesy” to his friends.

 

“Especially wannabe crackers like you,” Suarez had explained on their first full night in-country, when they were sacked out on uncomfortable cots in temporary quarters at Bagram.

 

Cheesy was nothing like Poke.  He didn’t give a shit about the white man’s agenda, and he never bitched about being oppressed.   Mostly, he gave as good as he got, sang Eminem under his breath (the irony was lost on no one), and did his job.

 

He was competent and easygoing, and Brad liked him.

 

Cheesy slaps him five and welcomes him to the Humvee, apparently happy enough to have Brad on his nine, directly behind McGivens, who nods at Brad and Suarez, calls up to McClintock, “Good up there?” and doesn’t wait for Will’s double-tap on the roof before signaling that Nguyen should roll out.

 

Nguyen is a total unknown; he’s been at FB Shkin only a handful of days, called in to replace Echeverra.  Nguyen seems calm enough, eyes hidden behind Blues Brothers glasses, one hand on the wheel, the other tapping out a tune on the gear-shift.  Time will tell if he’s got what it takes.

 

Brad’s content to watch his sector, even if he has limited visibility because of the rise of the ridge to the northeast.  It’s okay, though.  He knows this road, could glass it in his sleep, and the first choke point for ambush is five klicks away.  The danger here, as Brad’s team had learned only days ago, is IEDs.  The one that had gotten his team had been hidden in the declension beneath a flat rock that jutted out into the road where an apparent rockslide had recently occurred.

 

In fact, the “rockslide” had been deliberate, a little roadside decoration to sell the deadly prize in the middle.

 

Brady, who’d been behind Brad in the rear passenger seat, had gotten the brunt of the explosion.  A piece of shrapnel had torn a chunk out of his throat, and as his arterial blood had soaked Will’s pants, Cooper had started shouting, “I can’t see!  I can’t see!”

 

Brad had at first thought it was because Brady’s blood had covered Cooper’s face, but closer inspection of the situation had revealed that the poor kid’s eyes were full of gravel splinters and road filth. 

 

McClintock had escaped serious injury because in the seconds before the rear right tire of the Humvee had struck the trigger, he’d swiveled his gun to rake a stand of pines halfway up the slope to their right.  When Brad had asked him later why he’d done it, Will had said, “There were guys in white robes up there.  Didn’t you see them?”

 

In fact, Brad hadn’t seen anything of the kind.  He’d been looking at the intel coming in on the force tracker and listening to an update on the radio from one of the prophet spooks back at the FB.  He’d been turned inward, away from the blast radius, which had spared him the worst of the shrapnel.  

 

Brad’s not thinking about the fact that he’s sitting in the same position as Brady had been.  He’s not thinking about arterial spray or blinding rock splinters or the dull incomprehension in Will’s eyes when he’d slid down from the turret.

 

He’s not.

 

He’s got a job to do, one that comes with certain risks, a fact he accepted long ago.  Eyes to his scope, Brad scans the tree line, listens to Cheesy singing about losing himself, and settles in for another day in the shit-show.

 

Four hours and twenty-three klicks later, boxed in by cedar-dotted ridges, tension electrifying the small hairs on the nape of his neck, Brad catches the strobe-effect flash of sun on metal about four hundred meters up and a hundred meters north of their current position.

 

“Hold it,” he says, voice calm.  He can feel a cold spot behind his diaphragm start to spread, freezing out the fear and uncertainty, the frustration, the memories of Nate he’s been fighting against the last half-hour.  Eye to his scope, he scans the ridge in the area where he’d seen the glint.

 

“There,” he says, almost at the same time the LT does, and Brad hasn’t finished taking in another, centering breath when the first grenade rockets into the ground twenty meters from the nose of the Humvee, geyser of dirt and rock pelting the windshield but otherwise doing no harm.

 

“Will,” Brad shouts, slapping the roof overhead twice, and the .50 answers, its guttural cough shaking stones from the ridge that patter down on the hood and the roof.

 

Ahead, the hillside where Brad had spotted the tell is obscured by dust as the big gun chews its way across the landscape, stitching holes in cedars, gouging up rock-falls, and leaving nothing but destruction in its wake.

 

“He’s not alone,” McGivens predicts.  Next to Brad, Suarez is halfway out his window, glassing the opposite ridgeline behind them.  From the driver’s seat, Nguyen’s got eyes on the hillside ahead and to their left.  Above them, Will has paused in his firing to conserve ammunition and wait for the dust to clear.

 

Brad’s scanning the area just beyond the edges of the dust cloud, searching for movement.  He sees it even as the first bullets carom wildly off the hood and strike the windshield.

 

“That’s accurate fire!” McGivens calls, but Brad’s already returning fire, steady, calculated bursts that zero in on the muzzle flashes just visible through the still-floating dust.

 

Will holds off, giving Brad the chance to get some action before he covers the hillside in a cloud that gives the enemy the advantage.

 

“There’re over here!” Suarez shouts before he opens up with his SAW, the ugly chatter of the gun answered by another RPG, this one just behind them.  Debris rains down on the roof, but Brad hasn’t got time to worry about Will.  There are three insurgents coming down the ridge fast and hard, charging but not out of control, pausing to aim in turn, covering his side of the Humvee in a deadly curtain, keeping Brad occupied.

 

They’re moving too fast for him to have time to aim, so he shifts his M4 to automatic and starts sweeping their line of descent.

 

  
One stumbles and goes down, red stain spreading on his shoulder.  The other two keep coming.

 

“They’re charging!” Suarez shouts from his side of the vehicle.

 

If they get too close, the big gun won’t do any good, but even as he’s thinking it, there’s a thump against the rooftop, and the .50 goes quiet.

 

_Shit, is Will hit?_

 

Brad takes a breath, focuses, reloads, and sweeps the hillside again.

 

A second bad guy falls, infamous pink mist hanging in the air like a cartoon special effect where his head had been even after he’s fallen.

 

The third dives for cover behind a rock and raises the gun on extended arms at random intervals to shoot wildly over it.

 

Then there’s a strange lull Brad’s sometimes experienced in the middle of a fierce firefight, when everyone seems to be reloading or taking a bead on target.  It’s broken by the ululating cry of Afghan warriors from the ridgeline behind him, and Brad suppresses a shiver as he breathes out once again and presses his eye to the scope, waiting for the guy behind the rock to show himself.

 

He can’t worry about Will’s continued silence on the .50 or the bad guys coming up on his six.  He has to trust the others to do their jobs just as they trust him to do his.

 

The guy hunkered down behind the rock seems dug in for life, but Brad figures he’ll run out of ammunition eventually, so he returns to making sweeps with his scope, looking for muzzle flashes, half expecting a mortar round to blow them off their chassis.

 

As if he’s summoned a demon from the deep blue sky, there’s a familiar sound and a mortar round explodes against the ridge over his head.  

 

“Fuck!”  He ducks inside and turns his face away from the open window as a shower of needle-like rock splinters and a shit-ton of crap pummels the Humvee.

 

In the seat ahead, McGivens is swearing, and Brad spares another thought for Will, whose legs indicate nothing—he could be stunned, unconscious, dead. 

 

He shakes the kid’s knee, shouts, “Will!  You hit?  Will!” and beneath Brad’s hand, the leg shifts.  “Will!”

 

A double tap on the roof signals that their gunner is still alive, and then the .50 is coughing out its gutting rounds once more.

 

Brad focuses on the guy behind the rock, who’s still spraying wildly, though in semi-automatic bursts now.

 

  
_Low on ammo, fucker._

 

He waits until he sees the hands, like the world’s deadliest puppets, curled around the black Russian stock, aims for the surface of the rock itself, and gives the guy a face full of rock shrapnel even as he’s loosing a burst toward Brad, who doesn’t flinch as a bullet wings off the front fender and into a scraggly bush clinging for its life to the steep slope of the ridge.

 

While he’s preoccupied with picking off the lone gunman up there, Brad notices that the gun chatter from the far side of the Humvee has declined.  It ceases altogether as the guy behind the rock disappears, and only then does Will let up on the trigger.

 

There’s a humming, cotton-in-the-ears silence filled almost immediately by the ubiquitous tinnitus that follows close combat in the glorified tin can they drive into firefights.

 

“Okay?” McGivens yells, and they answer in a ragged call-back.

 

Suarez is bleeding from a graze across his chin—“Fuckin’ paint chip,” he grouses, running a hand along the ragged edge of the doorframe where the window molding used to be.  Now there’s a jagged gouge, the bullet that made it embedded in the side of the Lieutenant’s seat, not four inches from Brad’s left shoulder.

 

Will calls down, “Here,” like he’s reporting a coach’s roster call, and Nguyen just waves his hand, wordless but grinning like a fool.

 

Brad realizes this is probably his first combat experience.

 

“Good?” he asks, voice probably too loud—but how the fuck would he know?

 

 Nguyen barks a short, sharp laugh, “Fuck yeah.”

 

McGivens calls in the report of contact even as Brad, Cheesy, and Will dismount to check for wounded and sweep the bodies for intel.

 

They’re two-thirds of the way up the near slope, fanning out to flank the rock that acted as cover for the last bad guy on this side of the road, when they hear it—a vehicle grinding toward them.

 

Hating to leave an unknown quantity at his back—there’s no guarantee that last bad guy is actually dead— but not relishing the thought of being out in the open if that truck has a gun mount, Brad takes cover behind another rock and waits, willing his breath to still in his chest, the blood to cease rushing like a sea in his ears.

 

In the Humvee, McGivens has climbed into the turret and is aiming the .50 steadily in the direction from which the truck is coming.

 

As it noses around the next curve in the road, the first thing they all see is a white Toyota Hilux, preferred vehicle of the Taliban and its many bastard offspring who use the 4 X 4 to get around the goat roads of the Hindu Kush.

 

Brad’s finger tightens along the trigger guard.

 

The next thing he notices is a familiar second-hand Kevlar helmet, probably bought off of a British private contractor.  

 

The bullet holes bleeding rust along the driver’s side door and rear quarter-panel clinch it for Brad.

 

“What the fuck?” he breathes, watching Nate ease the truck into park and raise his hands clear of the steering wheel and then hold them out the window.

 

Brad stands up, moving without really thinking about it, situational awareness shot to hell by the sight of Nate staring down a friendly .50. 

 

The sound of the bullet follows in the wake of its trajectory, but Brad feels its sting only after he hears it, the blood pumping toward the wound and tracing his right bicep in fire.

 

He processes that he’s been shot even as he ducks for cover and turns toward the presumed shooter, but Cheesy is already loosing a string of Spanish curses and opening up.

 

A gurgled cry and then silence follow the burst of gunfire, and then there’s a minor avalanche as Will slides toward him, tourniquet already open, halfway around Brad’s upper arm before Brad can say, “It’s okay.  I’m okay.  I’m fine, it’s just a graze.”

 

Will’s eyes are unfocused, his breath coming in pants, and Brad grips Will’s near shoulder, squeezes hard in lieu of an unmanning slap across the face.  “Will!”

 

When that gets no response, he tries, “McClintock!” in his best Master Sergeant’s voice.

 

Will’s eyes snap to, understanding trickling into them.

 

His hands are shaking so hard he can’t manage to pull the tourniquet through.  Brad’s wound bleeds sluggishly into the fabric of his blouse.

 

“I’m fine,” he says, more softly this time, catching Will’s eyes, which are wide and wild.  “Everyone’s good.”

 

Which is when he remembers that Nate is still down there with the .50 trained on him and no one to say friend or foe.  The hand-painted red crosses mean exactly squat.  That’s been used as a ruse by the bad guys so often that no one actually pays attention to anything short of a medevac chopper.

 

“He’s a friendly,” Brad calls, the sound echoing against the dull drumming in his head.  It’s going to be a bitch of a headache later, but for now the last of the adrenaline is keeping it at bay.

 

Brad feels the first real sting of his bullet wound as he’s making his way down the steep slope toward Nate, who’s still standing with his hands in full view and his eyes fixed on the Humvee.  

 

McGivens has dropped his hands from the .50 but is still in the turret.  Nguyen, per protocol, is still in the driver’s seat.

 

From just behind him, Cheesy says, “Okay, Colbert?”

 

“Right as rain,” he breezes, eyes not leaving Nate.  He closes the distance between them as Cheesy and Will cross the road between the two vehicles and head for the dead or dying on the other side.

 

“Bad timing?”

 

Nate sounds like he’s going for casual, but it comes out a little strained. 

 

“Didn’t know you cared, sir,” Brad observes.  He’s wearing the annoying little lip-curl smirk that he knows from experience pisses Nate off.

 

McGivens chooses that moment to approach, and Brad makes the introductions.  

 

“Lieutenant Dan McGivens, this is Captain Nate Fick, USMC.”

 

  
McGivens’ posture changes minutely and Nate hastens to add, “Retired,” shooting Brad a meaningful look.  Brad’s unrepentant about ruffling McGivens, however, and the LT seems to recover, inquiring about Nate’s business in the region, for all the world as if they happened to run into each other at Faneuil Hall on market day.

 

Brad listens to Nate spin the same bullshit lie with the same ease of practice he’d used with Brad himself, and he wonders what it was, what series of events could’ve brought Nate to his current circumstance.

 

When the conversation comes back to Brad, he does his duty by indicating the rest of the team and offering names, and then McGivens says, “Ten mikes,” and returns to the Humvee, where Cheesy has spread out the spoils of their body searches.  

 

Nate’s eyes are hard as he glances up the ridge at the bad guys’ bodies.

 

“How many?”

 

Brad shrugs, forgetting his wound, and regrets it immediately.  “Maybe six or eight.  And one mortar round.”

 

They pause then to ponder the sky with identical expressions of mixed consideration and puzzlement.  Typically, once the enemy knows their position, he lobs everything he’s got at them.  A single accurate mortar round is an anomaly.

 

“Maybe they had only the one?”

 

Brad considers the dead men’s IDs he’s holding in the hand not dripping dark blood into the thirsty Afghan dirt.  “Syrian.  Yemeni.  Syrian.  Should have plenty of al-Qaeda cash.  Could be from any of sixty, sixty-five groups that regularly claim responsibility for attacks and IEDs in this region.  Who knows how well-armed they are?”

 

“Probably not Haqqani Network,” Nate hazards.  There’s something calculating in his gaze, almost as though Nate’s a stranger attempting a cost-benefit spreadsheet.

 

Brad wonders idly which column he’d fall into.

 

“You seem to know a lot for a POG.”

 

If the insult strikes home, Nate doesn’t show it.  Instead, he laughs, that dry sound he makes when he’s not actually humored, and looks at Brad’s wound.

 

“You should get that seen to.”

 

“We’ve got six hours left on our patrol.”

 

“I’ve got a kit in the truck.”

 

And that’s how Brad ends up shirtless on the tailgate of Nate’s Hilux, the length of the truck and the bulk of the cab blocking them from the view of his team, who are ranged around the Humvee eating MREs and shooting the shit, their casual words belying the manner in which they watch the ridgelines around them, one hand always near a trigger.

 

  
This ain’t a fucking picnic.

 

“This needs stitches,” Nate says, apology in his voice as he swipes the wound with an antiseptic wipe that lights the gash on fire.

 

Brad sucks a breath in through his teeth and tries not to tense up.  His assessment agrees with Nate’s; it’s a graze, but it’s deep enough that it probably won’t stop bleeding without stitches.

 

“Do it,” Brad urges, and Nate nods, all at once serious and focused and somehow younger, for a fleeting moment the look in his eyes as he raises the needle reminding Brad of Iraq and uncertainties and a sense that Nate needed Brad to need him.

 

The searing tug of surgical thread through the skin at the wound’s edge is a welcome distraction from the less localized pain he’s feeling at the memory.

 

Nate’s close enough that Brad can feel his breath ghosting across Brad’s bare neck, and he can’t suppress the shiver it brings.

 

Nate’s hands pause, one on the ball of Brad’s shoulder squeezing—to steady him?  To let him know he shares Brad’s pain?

 

Brad risks a glance at Nate’s face and sees concentration there and something else, something he might call vulnerability if he hadn’t earlier seen the cold killer lurking just beneath the surface of those eyes.

 

This country strips everyone of their best weaknesses.

 

The stitching is done, a neat black row of X’s, and Nate’s applying a bandage over the wound.  The tips of his fingers are warm even through the gloves he’s wearing, and they linger, dragging on the thin skin at the inside of his bicep, along the blue vein at his elbow, at the pulse leaping stronger under Nate’s fingertips.

 

“Nate,” Brad says, voice low, dragging on the first vowel.  He clears his throat, and the moment is gone, Nate pulling away, stripping off his gloves as if to dispose of what he’d just done, repacking the kit and cleaning up the mess of bloody gauze left behind.

 

Soon, there’s nothing but a red-brown smear on the tailgate to indicate that Brad had bled there.

 

“We’re Oscar Mike in five,” McGivens calls as Brad slides off the tailgate and tests his legs.  He doesn’t think he’s lost enough blood to be woozy, but he knows better than to be proud when it comes to things like fainting. 

 

Marines don’t faint.

 

“Why are you here, anyway?” Brad asks, and he schools his voice into the _nothing to see here_ tone he often uses when he doesn’t want anyone to know that he cares at all about the answer.

 

“Heading back to FB Shkin.”

 

“Couldn’t get enough of it when you were there last night?”  He doesn’t mean it like it sounds, at least not when he says it.  After, though, he hears what it could mean and is strangely okay with it.

 

“Something like that,” Nate answers easily, and for a second they’re standing an inch too close on Gunny Wynn’s back porch, matching beers slicking their sweating palms, eyes catching at the corners and trying not to smile in a manner that gives everything away.

 

Brad suffers a moment of vertigo he blames on his recent wound, but he knows it’s actually the rug being pulled out from under his feet—because that was flirting.

  
Nate fucking Fick was _flirting_ with him.  And they don’t flirt.  There is no “they,” in point of fact.  Nate himself saw to that.

 

Brad cuts a look at Nate as he moves to stow the first aid kit.

 

“Well, you’re welcome any time,” Brad says, letting his voice rough over the penultimate word.

 

Nate’s hand slips on the handle of the kit and it drops with a clang behind the pickup’s bench seat.  

 

Inside, Brad crows in triumph.  Outside, he dons the familiar, annoying smirk.

 

 

“But really,” he continues, “Did you forget something?”

 

“I have to make a pick-up.  I thought the stuff would be there last night, but Captain Taylor told me it was arriving today, so…”  Nate’s sheepish grin is a little shopworn.  Brad guesses it works alright on the locals, but he knows Nate too well not to see the weariness around the edges.

 

“Right.”  Brad extends the word to just this side of disbelief.  “Because you haven’t got a SAT phone?”

 

Nate can’t quite square his eyes on Brad’s.  He picks a focal point just over Brad’s left shoulder, as if something happening on the Humvee behind him requires his full attention.  It’s a tell, and it makes Brad a little warm to see it because it might mean that the Nate he knew is still in there somewhere.

 

The Nate that wouldn’t lie to Brad even when the truth hurt.

 

_This can’t happen again._

 

“I have a pick-up,” Nate repeats, then, climbing into his truck.  Brad senses Nate’s answer is as close to the actual truth as he’s going to get.  

 

If Afghanistan has taught him anything, it’s to take what he can get as long as it doesn’t come with wires.  Nate’s omission doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that’s going to lead to explosions.

 

Of course, Brad’s been wrong before.

 

**14 April 2006.  14:30 local time.  Somewhere NW of FB Shkin.  Bermel District, Paktika Province, Afghanistan.**

 

Nate’s sixteen klicks from his rendezvous point when he hits the pothole.

 

That in and of itself isn’t unusual; the roads are shit, even ones like this, which are heavily patrolled and partially resurfaced by the military forces that use the road.

 

What’s unusual is that Nate didn’t try to avoid it.

 

What’s more unusual is that Nate didn’t see it, which is why he ended up driving through rather than around it and why he’s now standing next to his truck and staring at the busted front right tire and bent rim of his Hilux.

 

Fucking Brad Colbert.

 

To be fair, it’s not Brad’s fault that Nate was remembering a certain tequila-hazed night in a darkened hallway in a house made loud with the laughter of people who would probably deeply distrust the man he is now.

 

Back at the ambush site as he’d patched Brad up, even through the latex of his gloves, Nate had felt Brad’s heat and life and had _wanted_ him, a gut-punch of visceral need that had left him a little breathless, made his words terse and his movements jerky.

 

He’d tried to hide his reaction to touching Brad, tried to disguise the way Brad’s naked torso had affected him.  From Brad’s drawl and his skeptical look, Nate knows he did a piss-poor job.

 

 

The flirting hadn’t helped either.

 

Looking at the mess he’s made of his truck, Nate considers how touching Brad has always been a talisman for disaster.

 

Three years and a thousand lifetimes ago, the first thing Nate had realized when he’d returned to his right mind after the mind-blowing orgasm Brad had wrung out of him was that they were in an exposed position in Mike’s back hallway.  Anyone could wander through, any of their brothers, any number of brothers’ wives or girlfriends.

  
Hell, Mike’s kids could have woken up and stumbled upon them here.

 

But it was more than the possibility of exposure that had made Nate feel suddenly vulnerable and open to attack.

 

In the moments after they’d given in to the one thing they’d fought against harder than the enemy, Nate had balanced on the very edge of something paralyzing, something terrifying.

 

Brad’s breath had been hot against Nate’s neck, and one hand had curled damply against Nate’s exposed belly.  The other was splayed flat against the wall next to Nate’s ear, and he’d had to resist an urge to turn his head and place a tender, closed-mouth kiss against the strong bone of Brad’s wrist.

 

Nate couldn’t be tender because that would have acknowledged that this had been more than a culmination of too-long glances and speaking looks, the occasional “accidental” brushing of a shoulder or a hand.

 

In the single greatest act of cowardice in Nate’s life, he’d put himself away, put Brad away—put away everything that might’ve made a difference, might’ve destroyed and remade them both, and said, “This can’t happen again.”

 

With a noise of disgust—whether at himself or the tire or Brad Colbert, Nate refuses to examine—Nate moves around to the back of the Hilux and starts the laborious process of freeing the spare wheel from its tire mount on the tailgate.

 

The flat makes him more than an hour late for the rendezvous with his contact, an actual arms dealer, an Australian who calls himself Jake and who can be counted on for one thing only:  Always acting in his own best interest.  In this case, Jake won’t deal directly with insurgent groups—too dangerous, he said over SAT phone, laughing in Nate’s ear like they’ve just shared a dirty joke.

 

As Nate executes a three-point turn at the dead-end where the meet is being made, putting him nose-out should he have to be Oscar Mike in a hurry, Jake materializes from the deep shadow of a cleft in the rock-face where a vertical cliff meets the shoulder-less road.  It’s an inauspicious meeting ground, deliberately chosen to expose Nate and give Jake the advantage of cover.

 

Nate’s waiting by his truck as Jake steps out of the cave flanked by two guys with big guns and don’t-fuck-with-me expressions.

 

“You’re late,” Jake grouses, waving the unlit cigar that he always carries.  Nate thinks of it privately as his super-villain prop.

 

“Flat,” Nate answers shortly.  

 

Jake nods as if Nate’s said something profound.

 

“Got the cash?”

 

“Got the goods?”

 

Stand-off.

 

Jake’s backup stand dispassionate, eyes hidden by blackout sunglasses, hands competent on their guns.  They point them in the middle distance between Nate and certain death.

 

Jake breaks first, grinning like a maniac, and waves a hand at one of the two, who answers the unspoken command by returning to the cave and coming back with a crate that must weigh a lot, judging by the way the guy’s biceps bulge.

 

Jake waves again, like he’s conducting the world’s deadliest orchestra, and Gun Thug Number One opens the crate, revealing a couple of shiny new M4s, ammunition for same, a block of C-4 plastic explosive, three fragmentation grenades, two anti-tank mines still in their individual wooden stabilization frames, a neat coil of detonation wire, and a detonator still in its Radio Shack packaging.

 

Nate looks unimpressed.  “M203?  RPG-7?”

 

“In time, my friend, in time.”  Jake makes a “gimme” motion with the hand not holding the cigar, and Nate reaches slowly around to the small of his back to produce a thick, fat rectangle neatly wrapped in brown paper and sealed inside a waterproof bag.

 

He jiggles it meaningfully and raises an eyebrow.

 

Theirs is a symphony of signs.

 

At Jake’s miniscule nod, Gun Thug Number One returns to the cave and comes back with a larger crate.  This time, he grunts a little setting it down.

 

Inside is an M203 nestled intimately against an RPG-7, their respective tripods jumbled obscenely in a tangle of angular black limbs.

 

The crate is joined by a second, smaller one containing the ammunition for each weapon.

 

Nate hands the money over at another gesture, waits patiently while Jake counts it, and lets Gun Thug Number One do the heavy lifting while he himself secures the load in the back of his truck.  He almost misses the guy; Nate’ll have to unload it by himself at the drop point later on.

 

Nate covers the load with a mountain camouflage tarp, says, “I’ll be in touch,” and pulls away without a glance in the rearview.  Jake’s men will cover Nate’s departure until they’re sure no one is going to drop in for a quick ambush.

 

He covers the twenty or so klicks to FB Shkin with his eyes on the road and his mind firmly fixed on plans for the near future that have nothing of Brad Colbert in them.

 

 

Initially, the mission had been to make contact with Haqqani Network splinter groups to supply them with weapons that might encourage in-fighting.  Two such missions had already proven fatal for ISAF troops, however, and Nate’s higher-ups had decided instead that they needed to root out the foreign money backing such groups.

 

Obviously, the CIA wanted no part in supplying Nate with ISAF weapons—it’d take only one American-made bullet killing one American-born soldier to draw Americans’ attention to what was really happening in Afghanistan, and the CIA liked its citizens complacent and ignorant, thank you very much.

 

So they’d tasked Nate with dual mission parameters:  Make contact with the enemy and discover the local Western supplier of American munitions.

 

All while building a positive rapport with the locals and pretending innocence even to the ISAF forces stationed at FB Shkin.

 

Easy peasy, as Nate’s niece, Abigail, might say.

 

Thinking of Abigail reminds Nate of the little girls of Ghar Waale, Turan’s cousins, Lema and Mina.  Lema, perhaps six, is shy and quiet, rarely speaking or smiling but always observing, her wide, dark eyes watching everything Nate does.  Mina is the opposite of her younger sister, at eight an outgoing, inquisitive tomboy with a bright, mischievous smile and an infectious giggle that never fails to make Nate smile in turn.

 

He realizes he’s got a ghost of a smile on his lips as he rounds the bend in the road that leads to the guarded straightaway before the gates of Firebase Shkin and erases the look, feeling unsettled in a way he hasn’t for a long time.  He’s a fucking professional carrying a load of death-dealing weapons onto an ISAF firebase where they certainly wouldn’t be welcomed should the troops there figure out what they’re for.

 

In an ideal world, Nate would’ve cached the weapons where they’re safe and gone back to Shkin with an empty truck, but thanks to the flat, he hasn’t got time, and anyway, it’s always better to have a second, independent accounting of the goods should there be any questions or accusations later.

 

Captain Taylor is Nate’s contact on base.  Though not himself a CIA asset, Taylor had worked counter-intelligence for a couple of years before being called to active duty.

 

He doesn’t approve of Nate, a fact that he makes clear every time they meet.

 

“You’re late,” Taylor says as his eyes stray to the truck-bed and widen a fraction.  “What the fuck?” he hisses, leaning in to Nate’s open window as Nate shuts the engine off.  

 

“Flat,” he explains, internally cursing his own memory and Brad’s half-naked body.  “Inventory,” he short-hands, hoping to distract Taylor from his general pissiness.  

 

Nate doesn’t care that the guy doesn’t like him; he doesn’t need friends—he needs to get this mission over with before it turns into a shit-show.

 

“Yeah, fine.”  Taylor indicates that Nate should pull the truck under a sort of carport rigged out of camo netting set up around the back of a temporary structure that serves as the supply depot for the firebase.  It’s guarded on every side by high Hesco walls and backs up to the rear perimeter of the FB.  

 

 

They’ll be shielded from base eyes there, and the net should give them privacy from prying eyes in the hills around the firebase, too.

 

Taylor works efficiently and with a minimum of words, for which Nate’s grateful.  He wants to be long gone from FB Shkin before Brad’s team returns from their patrol.    

 

When he’s finished inventorying the weapons, he signs off on the list and hands it to Nate for his signature.

 

“Secure files,” Nate says.  Secure files go in a locked titanium firebox that is programmed to burn everything in it to ashes with a detonate code sent via SAT or cell signal.  The CIA may not appreciate a paper trail connecting them to dubious arms deals, but they’re still a government agency, and they still bow to the gods of paperwork and redundancy.

 

Taylor snorts as if to say, _I was doing this when you were still flunking high school calculus._

 

Whatever his issue with Nate—maybe it’s his shaggy hair or his faded _Rush_ tee-shirt—Taylor keeps it to himself except for his tone, which doesn’t disguise his dislike.

 

“Keep this shit away from my guys,” he says, indicating the load in Nate’s truck.  

 

Nate can’t guarantee that the weapons won’t be used against Americans.  Much as he’d like to think they can take apart Shahzar’s little army and trace his people back to their money men, back to the al-Qaeda operatives who are surely behind the incursion—can do all of that _before_ the weapons can be used against ISAF forces, Nate knows that counter-intelligence is often oxymoronic.

 

Taylor knows this, too, if the grim turn of his mouth and his disgusted head-shaking are anything to go by, so Nate says nothing as he pulls out of the carport and turns onto the road that leads to the gate.

  
Just as he arrives at the gate, a Humvee appears at the other end of the gauntlet made up of Hesco bags, an improvised kill zone in the crossfire of the two big .50s mounted on low towers to either side of the gate.

 

Nate’s forced to wait—incoming always takes precedence over outgoing traffic.

 

Sure enough, it’s Colbert’s team, or rather, Nate corrects himself, McGivens’.

 

Brad gives Nate a look as the Humvee rolls past his idling truck, and though Nate would like to pretend he didn’t understand it, he can’t pretend it doesn’t make him want to stay.

 

 

Cursing, he backs his truck up into a spot where the load is more or less obscured, and walks over to where Brad is waiting in the late afternoon shade near the mess hall door.

 

“Buy you dinner?” 

 

Nate hears humor in Brad’s voice and also makes out the effort it costs him to keep it light.

 

“Shouldn’t you see a medic about that arm?” Nate counters, the idea of sharing a table with Brad making his stomach swoop and flutter.

 

_What is he, a fucking twelve-year-old girl?  Jesus._

 

 

“It’s fine.  Somebody patched it up real good.”  Brad’s laconic drawl emphasizes the way his eyes are fixed on Nate’s face, daring him to refuse Brad’s invitation to dinner.

 

“Yeah, alright—I could eat.  But I have to be on the road in thirty mikes.”

 

“No problem.  Chow line’s pretty fast and the food’s not good enough to linger over.”

 

It’s early enough that the mess is half-empty, plenty of bench-style tables free of all but groups of two or three guys packing in an early meal before hitting the gym or taking their place on guard duty along the base’s perimeter.

 

Since Nate’s been living on what he can cook over his little gas stove—mostly reconstituted beef stew, soup, and macaroni with sauce—he appreciates the canned peas, instant mashed potatoes, and meat square in brown gravy.  They even have some kind of fruit cobbler for dessert.

 

“Non-alcoholic beer?” Nate quizzes when they get to the beverage table.

 

“To remind us we’re Americans, sir,” Brad deadpans, and Nate snickers, snagging a bottle of water instead and following Brad to a table shorter in length and somewhat set apart from the rest.

 

“Officer’s corner?” Nate guesses.

 

  
Brad shrugs.  “They eat later.”

 

The first few minutes are companionable enough, Brad obviously hungry and Nate enjoying the taste of something he didn’t have to heat up himself.

 

There’s local bread to dip in the gravy, salt and pepper on the tables, napkins made from recycled paper, 60% post-consumer content stamped in Army green in the corners.  

 

It’s funny what a person gets used to and the things he forgets about.

 

“So what are you really doing here, sir?”

 

“Brad, I’m not an officer anymore.  You don’t have to—.”

 

Brad cuts him off.  “Save it.  Stop deflecting and answer the goddamned question, _Nate_.”

 

“I can’t,” Nate says, feeling deflated and helpless at the anger clear in Brad’s face, at the way he’s set his jaw and the tightness of his fingers around the handle of his fork.

 

Brad makes a disgusted sound, and Nate looks at his food, suddenly not remotely interested in it.  

 

“Fine, let’s see what else you can’t answer.  Where’ve you been the last three years?”

 

That gets Nate’s eyes up.  He scans Brad’s face, trying to figure out what the other man is expecting to hear.  Does he want to know that Nate was recruited in his first semester at Harvard, the book he’d planned to write still only a vague outline on his laptop, his patience with academia already growing thin?  

 

Does he want to hear how Nate was captured by rebels in northern Nigeria and tortured for intel about weapons and Western interests?  How he thought about Brad during the long hours and days of that hell, thought of his calmness in the face of immense danger?

 

Or does he want to hear that even in that hallway, with Brad’s hands on him and Brad’s lips wet against his throat, Nate knew he couldn’t hold on, couldn’t stay?

 

Does he want to hear that Nate was terrified of the way it felt to be held in place by Brad’s greater height and his strength, that he was suddenly aware of how very much he wanted to be pinned that way forever, that Brad could have asked anything— _anything_ —and Nate would’ve given it in that moment?

 

Does he want to hear that Nate might’ve stayed if only Brad had said, “Wait!” or “Don’t go!” or even “What the fuck, Nate?”  Might’ve let his desire, his love, overwhelm the fear long enough to grab hold and never let go again?

 

Because all of those things are true, and none of them are classified, but Nate’s pretty sure he can’t say them anyway.  

 

Nate doesn’t know what expression he’s wearing—maybe he looks as stricken as Brad does as Brad takes in Nate’s face and realizes what he’s asked.

 

“Be careful what you wish for,” Nate murmurs, and Brad nods raggedly and spears his cobbler with a little too much force, red filling seeping out from the edges in a slow bleed.

 

Nate looks away.

 

When he looks back, Brad’s eyes are steady on him.

 

“Tell me,” he says.  It shouldn’t be an order; Brad’s not his superior.  Hell, Nate’s not even military.  But he owes Brad an explanation, at the very least, and Brad’s calling in the debt. That’s what Nate hears in Brad’s voice.

 

“I thought when I left the Corps that I’d move on to a place where I could make a difference.  I thought I’d become the person making the policies instead of enacting them.  I don’t know how I could still have been so naïve after Iraq,” Nate shakes his head at his own idealism.

 

“You always were tenacious with hope, sir.”

 

Nate appreciates the warmth in Brad’s smile, nods to acknowledge it, and continues.

 

  
He tells Brad about his first classes at Harvard, about the brilliant kids around him.  “And that’s what they were,” he notes, “Kids.  Smart, yeah.  Creative.  Energetic.  But kids.  I felt about ninety years old half the time.”  
  


He leaves out the parts when he’d had to defend his decisions in the Corps, defend the words he’d spoken that had made it into Wright’s book.

 

“The recruiter caught me at the perfect time:  I’d just gotten a B on an essay on the religio-political hegemonical structures of Islamist groups active in Iraq because the professor felt that I’d failed to take into account some ‘elements of cultural context.’”  The air quotes are invisible but quite clear.  Nate ducks his head at Brad’s smirk, feels his face heating up.  “My girlfriend had dumped me because she couldn’t take my”—and he actually makes finger quotes around the next phrase—“‘pseudo-warrior deflection when faced with intimacy.’”

 

“‘Pseudo-warrior?’” Brad scoffs.  “She obviously didn’t know you very well.”

 

Nate feels his face growing warmer at Brad’s assessment but plunges ahead before he loses his nerve.

 

“And I…was regretting a lot of my decisions.  Not leaving the Corps,” he hastens to add, hesitating again, unsure of his next words, or rather, uncertain about their reception.  “It wasn’t the Corps I was sorry I’d let go,” he adds at last, softer.

 

It’s an effort to raise his eyes from the congealing gravy on his tray to look steadily at Brad, but Nate manages it, willing Brad to understand the words that Nate is leaving out.

 

Brad’s expression is inscrutable except for the faintest curving upward of one corner of his mouth and that beneath the cold blue water of his eyes something warmer is swimming to the surface.

 

Nate lets out a breath that’s louder than he’d intended it to be.  He feels like he’d been holding it for years.

 

Brad makes the minutest of nods, an economy of motion that suggests great forces at work in him, like a seismograph of skin, the almost imperceptible shudder of massive realignment.

 

“Anyway, she convinced me that I could do more—and more immediate—good working for the Company.  And that’s how I ended up here.”

 

Nate leaves out the greater balance of days, skips nine months of training almost as intense and certainly more isolating than OCS and BRS together.

 

Two successful missions.

 

  
Nigeria.

 

Three months of recovery, when he had moments he’d wished he’d died rather than survived to have to fight through the hell in his mind.

 

“And now I’m here.”

 

“Just like that,” Brad teases, but there’s an edge to it, the kind that might draw a line in the sand between them.

 

“It’s—,” Nate starts to say, reaching for an excuse that isn’t a complete lie, or worse, a patronizing truth bleached of real meaning.

 

“Need to know.”  Brad’s terse, mocking interruption echoes the darkening expression on his face and the way his eyes target Nate, like he’s marking him for future reconnaissance.

 

Nate nods this time, a sharp jerking of his chin.  “It’s better you not know.”

 

“You’re running guns to the bad guys, Nate,” Brad supplies, his name like an unpleasant taste spat from Brad’s tongue.  “Like the ones in the back of your truck.”

 

_Goddamned, fucking Recon marines._

The sudden switch from the loaded emotions they’d been trying to step around to the subject of actual land mines jars Nate enough that he forgets to dissemble and instead falls back on platitudes—“It’s for the greater good, Brad.”

 

Brad’s answering look could blister the paint off a Humvee.

 

“Whose good?”

 

It’s a worthy question, one without an easy—or maybe any—answer.  

 

“Ultimately, it might mean we bring down some important operatives in al-Qaeda, the ones funding and running foreign jihadists in Afghanistan.”  Since this is the sort of thing the _New York Times_ op-eds regularly speculate about, Nate doesn’t think he’s violating any protocols.

 

“Might is an awfully indefinite word, sir,” Brad notes.  His voice is drier than the dust on their boots.

 

“I haven’t got all of the answers, Brad.  What do you want me to say here?”

 

“I want you to tell me that Lance Corporal Sean Brady didn’t bleed to death because you sold anti-tank mines to the enemy.  I want you to tell me that Angela Brady, Sean’s wife, and Michael, their six-month-old son, aren’t going to have to live with the fact that their own people—goddamn red-blooded Americans—got her husband and his father killed _for the greater good_.”

 

Brad leans in across the table, eyes intense, focused, and Nate feels the breath freeze in his chest, cold trickling into his belly, chilling him.

 

“I want you to tell me, Nate, that you aren’t responsible for killing your brother Marine.  And I want you to do it without resorting to that bullshit Millsian crap you were spewing a minute ago. I’m not your chardonnay-sipping, Proust-spouting, hipster roommate who grounds his cynicism in having read Vonnegut’s entire oeuvre.   I’m the guy you fought beside in Iraq.”

 

When they’d served together, Nate had had occasion to hear Brad wield his satire with a surgeon’s precise grace on any number of unsuspecting assholes who’d earned the Iceman’s righteous ire.  Never had he expected to be sliced up by it himself, though he knows he deserves it.

 

The thing is, there’s an easy answer right there—Nate hasn’t yet sold any guns to Shahzar and his ilk—but easy isn’t what Brad wants.

 

Brad wants the truth, wants assurances that Nate isn’t going to get any of his men killed.

 

Nate can’t make that promise.

 

He says as much.

 

“Then we’re done here.”

 

Brad’s voice is careful, distant, the bland, pleasant bullshit voice Nate had heard him use on COs who were intolerable but had to be tolerated.

 

“Brad—,” he starts, but he gets no further.  

 

Brad has already stood up, is already moving away toward the trash, stacking his empty tray, and moving toward the door.

 

Nate can’t chase after him—it’d draw too much attention, and there are already curious eyes on them—and can’t call out, either.

 

Feeling like he’s just lost something he didn’t know he still had to give away, Nate follows Brad’s motions and heads outside.  He pauses near the mess door to look around, see if maybe Brad is waiting somewhere in the clearer air of the rapidly darkening night, but he sees no one familiar in the gloom.

 

The grey twilight fitting accompaniment for his thoughts, Nate checks the devil’s bargain weighing down the back of his truck, climbs in, and heads for the gate.  A last, hopeless glance in the rearview shows him nothing as he trundles across the perimeter and out into the growing dark, a coldness in his belly that has nothing to do with the way the temperature always drops once the sun sets.

 

**14 April 2006.  21:30 local time.  FB Shkin.  Bermel District, Paktika Province, Afghanistan.**

 

Brad should be asleep.

 

  
Captain Taylor had caught up to him a few minutes after Brad had left Nate at the mess hall.

 

“I’m moving you temporarily back to field training duty.  We’ve got a new CTPT to put together.  They’re pretty serious badasses; you should like them.”

 

“Yessir.”

 

“0500. Show ‘em how we sweat, American-style, and then take them up to the training site for the day.  Let them get used to the weapons and working together.  The usual.”

 

The Counter-Terrorism Pursuit Teams are made up of hardcore Afghan veterans, guys who’d been raised on gunpowder and guerrilla strikes. He hasn’t met one yet that has all of his fingers, and most of them are missing part of an ear and one or more toes—if it sticks out, it gets shot off, he guesses.  

 

Unlike a lot of the ANA guys Brad’s met, the CTPT trainees are absolutely unflinching; nothing fazes them.  They look like guys Brad had seen at the VA when he’d visited a buddy there—Vietnam vets with thousand-yard stares and hard-drinking survivors of Korea pickled on their own bitterness and daring the world to fuck with them.

 

Brad figures when a guy grows up on war, he gets pretty good at it, and he doesn’t mind working with the CTPT trainees.  Mostly, it’s a matter of translation, and even then, you don’t need too many words for “Get down!” and “Light ‘em the fuck up!”

  
War is a universal language.

 

So he should be sleeping now, not thinking about Nate’s eyes, his mouth, his hands around the fork, the way his knuckles grew white as he prepared to evade Brad’s question.

 

Nate might not know he has a tell, but Brad sees it.  No matter how many millions the government had poured into making Nate Fick a covert operative, there are things he’ll never be able to hide from Brad.

 

That that is still true eats away at Brad’s equanimity.

 

That he still cares that it’s true just makes him pathetic.

 

Growling at his own pussiness, Brad gets back into his boots, shrugs on a jacket, and heads for Cheesy’s quarters, hoping to cue him in on Will’s situation and trying _not_ to hope that the distraction will help settle his mind.

 

Cheesy’s entertaining Nguyen and Private Reese, a scrawny, acne-riddled kid from Missouri who sometimes reminds Brad of Ray.

 

“Hey, Iceman,” Cheesy says in his _Boyz in the Hood_ accent.  He flashes Brad a complicated hand sign, which Brad responds to with a one-fingered sign of his own.

 

“This fucker here,” Cheesy starts, and Brad feels his weariness ease a little.  “This fucker here is colder than a motherfucking glacier.”

 

“Yeah!”  Nguyen surprises Brad by jumping in.  “You shoulda seen him today.  Dude got shot and just,” Nguyen makes a gesture like an old-school greaser smoothing back the hair over his temple, “Walked it off.”

 

Reese gives Brad a wide-eyed look that’s a little too close to hero-worship for Brad’s comfort.

 

“Don’t listen to these illiterate, crack-addled miscreants,” Brad explains to Reese.  “They haven’t made sense since their mothers confused cocaine for dried formula and broke their tiny little brains.  It’s a tragedy, really.”

 

Cheesy’s mother is an accountant for a big law firm.  Nguyen’s runs a plastics manufacturing firm.

 

Reese doesn’t bat an eyelash, which tells him a lot about the kid’s survival skills, but he does reduce the wattage on his love meter, which makes Brad happy enough.

 

“Came to see about Will.”

 

“No worries, my friend.  We’ll keep him on this side of the red line.”

 

“I’m not worried about him making it into a Human Rights Watch report,” Brad answers.  “I just don’t want him losing it when you need him.”  That’s not strictly true, and they all know it, but no one disagrees with the summary.

 

“No worries,” Cheesy repeats, drawing out both words for emphasis.  “Kid’s gonna be fine with me.”  

 

Sometimes Cheesy adopts a stoner voice, dreamy and rough, like Cheech and Chong’s younger, slimmer, and better-armed cousin.

 

 

Usually, it makes Brad smile—at least on the inside.

 

But tonight, he’s too tired, too pissed off, too uneasy in his skin to do more than say, “Thanks,” and give a casual half-wave before turning to leave.

 

As distractions go, it wasn’t much help, because Nate is still in his head, so much so that Brad mistakes the figure lingering outside of his quarters for Nate, who’s got to be halfway back to Ghar Waale by now.

 

He’s surprised to see Lieutenant McGivens standing there, shoulders square and eyes wide, practically radiating earnestness.

 

Brad’s too old for this shit.

 

“Sir, what can I do for you?”

 

“If you have a concern about one of your men, Sergeant…Brad, I want you to feel that you can speak to me about it.  I know I’m not technically your commander, but I want you to feel that you can talk to me.”

 

Brad wonders if repetition is a nervous habit or if McGivens is just that boring.  

 

“Sir, if I may ask, what is this in regard to?”  Brad knows damned well where it’s coming from, but he’s learned that it’s almost always better if his superiors think he’s a little dimmer than they are.  It doesn’t work with all of them—Nate had been a notable exception, and Captain Taylor thinks it’s funny, calls it his “Surfer Dude routine”—but he gets away with it a surprisingly high percentage of the time.

 

“Your Private McClintock.  He seems…tightly wound.”

 

Brad thinks privately that euphemisms can go suck donkey dick, but out loud he says, “Will took Brady’s death hard, sir, but he’ll hold it together.”

 

Cheesy will see to it.  Brad doesn’t mention that, of course.

 

“Well…if _you_ need anything…”

 

It’s a measure of how much Nate’s thrown Brad off his game that it’s only now, as McGivens shifts an inch towards Brad and as Brad takes in the change in his tone, that he realizes this might be something more than a wet-behind-the-ears LT trying to earn his men’s trust.

 

_Oh_.

 

“I’m good, sir.  But thanks.”  He puts on his bland smile, the one that assures all viewers that Brad is one hundred percent self-sufficient and not even remotely interested in interacting.

 

“Okay, then.  Well, you know where I am, if—.”

 

“Thank you, sir,” Brad hastens to say before the kid’s mouth walks them both into a trap.

 

McGivens nods uncertainly and starts to move away, his stiff gait making him look like he’s got a bayonet up his ass.

 

Brad’s got his hand on his door when he hears, “One more thing, Sergeant.”  As Brad turns back towards him, McGivens closes the distance between them.

 

When they’re inches apart, McGivens well inside Brad’s personal space, he lowers his voice so that Brad has to lean closer still to hear.

 

“Your…friend.  The one you introduced me to.  The one you were at dinner with.”

 

Brad feels alarm arc across his skin.  “Yessir?”

 

“It’s none of my business…”

 

“Too late, sir,” Brad notes tersely, and he doesn’t give a rat’s ass that his tone is probably crossing the line.

 

“Right,” McGivens backpedals, actually taking a step or two away.  “I only wanted to say that I’ve heard things… .  At Bagram, before I came out here, there was talk of an agent in the area, a guy running a pretty high-level operation.  We were told to steer clear of him.  I thought you’d want to know.”

 

“Yessir,” Brad says.  It’s not really an answer.

 

“Well…good night, Sergeant.”

 

“Night, sir.”

 

Sleep is out of the question altogether now, but Brad gets out of his boots, slides his trousers and jacket off, and slips into bed anyway.  It’s warmer there, and it’s as good a place as any in which to think.

 

If scuttlebutt on the firebase involves Nate, it’s probably not safe for him in Ghar Waale.  There are three Afghan translators at Shkin, and Brad doesn’t know any of them well enough to trust them with sensitive information.  If any of the men have talked about Nate in front of the translators, Nate’s life could be in worse danger than it probably already is.

  
Nate probably doesn’t know that the word is out about him; from what little Brad’s been able to discern, Nate comes and goes at fairly infrequent intervals, and when he is on the base, he takes care to live up to his cover as a civilian aid worker.

 

Brad should get word to Nate.

 

Of course, he doesn’t really owe Nate a good goddamned thing.  Nate had left him three years ago, making a decision for both of them when he’d said, “This can’t happen again.”

 

Now he turns up in Afghanistan as a spook and expects Brad to understand the big picture that involves providing weapons to the enemy who are trying to kill Brad and his men every single fucking day.

 

Once upon a time, Nate never would have stomached such subterfuge, such hair-splitting philosophical nonsense.  Brad wonders what happened to Nate to make him into the man he has obviously become.

 

Sighing, Brad turns his back to the wall and stares through the gloom at the door to his quarters.  Intellectually, he knows he has every right to let Nate sink or swim on his own.  But the part of Brad that’s never quite gotten over Nate, never quite closed the door between them…that part of him wishes that it _had_ been Nate waiting for him with an earnest look and an unsubtle come-on.

 

Brad’s fully cognizant of the fact that the emotional part of him is a total pussy.  Swallowing back another sigh, he clamps down on the roiling in his stomach and tells himself to go the fuck to sleep.  It’s not like he can drive up to Ghar Waale now, anyway.

 

If in the cold light of morning it seems like Nate needs help, Brad will consider his options then.  Meanwhile, he’ll be fucked if he loses another minute of sleep over the man.

 

Turning again to lie on his back, Brad fixes his gaze on a spot on the ceiling and lets his eyes go unfocused.  He breathes in and out in a slow and steady rhythm and lets his mind go blank.  Despite the day’s disasters, he eventually feels the technique working, though his last clear thought is still of Nate before he tumbles over the edge into sleep.

 

**15 April 2006.  0500 local time.  FB Shkin.  Bermel District, Paktika Province, Afghanistan.**

 

There are five men waiting for Brad when he exits his tent as dawn stretches grey fingers over the indistinct moonscape of Afghanistan.

 

Their ages are impossible to estimate; the oldest could be thirty-three or fifty-five.  A life of war has carved all expression out of their brown faces, leaving channels and gulleys, draining their eyes of warmth.

 

Predictably, each has a visible scar, some deformity enacted by violence that he wears without any self-consciousness.  Then, most men of a certain age and occupation in Afghanistan have such scars, so they aren’t really special.

 

The leader calls himself Darab.  The others do not offer their names, only nod in acknowledgement of Brad’s presence.  

 

  
Darab is perhaps three inches shorter than Brad, with deep-set eyes ringed in heavy black circles and a mouth that turns down at both corners.  When he holds his hand up in an unhesitant offer to shake hands, Brad notices that he’s missing the tips of his two middle fingers on his right hand.  The left, he notes, is missing the pinky altogether.

 

Darab speaks in stilted, broken English, but his words are clear enough.  “We go?”

 

“Conditioning first,” Brad says, indicating that they should follow him.  There is a silent communication between the men, and then Darab falls in beside Brad and the others follow Darab.

 

Brad’s learned in his work with the CTPTs that the Afghan soldiers prefer to follow by example rather than be led or ordered around.  They are quick learners, particularly with weapons and tactics, and fierce and determined fighters.  

 

He’s heard rumors that they’re also brutal with captured enemies, but fortunately, Brad’s never had to test that intel.  The two teams he’d trained in the five some months he’s been at FB Shkin never encountered the enemy directly.

 

He wonders if this time will be different.

 

 

The men appear perfectly capable of surviving any fitness test Brad throws at them, and in return they toss at him some fairly disdainful looks.  He can understand why physical fitness isn’t high on their to-do list, given the conditions of their lives.  It’s not like they worry about heart health, after all.

 

They leave the front gate at 0610 for the range and training area, where they can simulate conditions under which they might be forced to fight with weapons they may never have had the opportunity to fire before.

 

To avoid predictability, they move the target range and practice grounds from one place to another, sometimes on a hilltop to the east, sometimes in a wadi to the northwest, sometimes several klicks away from the base.

 

This time, they’re following the road to Ghar Waale for three klicks and then turning north onto a dirt track that dead-ends at an abandoned Soviet-era water plant.  Brad’s been to the place twice before, and both times he had to resist an urge to recreate a scene out of one of the Moore-era Bond films.  The place has the same concrete charm of a Soviet-style missile launch site.

 

Anyway, it’s fairly ideal as a firing range, the crumbling concrete porous enough to absorb ammunition fired at targets and the hillside behind and above the plant offering a variety of environments for the guerilla tactics preferred by the small but deadly Afghan teams.

 

These men have obviously worked together, formally or otherwise, for many months, if not years.  Brad’s fairly certain that the one Darab calls Samsoon is his son; there’s a striking resemblance, and the younger man seems to defer to the older man in a way that Brad has witnessed in other such familial relationships.

 

Whatever the case, the team hardly needs Brad’s guidance.  After a few test rounds, they’ve each demonstrated mastery on the M4s, and three of them have scored impressive hits with the M203s.  Samsoon excels with the SAW, and one of the other men exhibits an exceptional eye with a sniper scope.

 

Before the sun has had a chance to dry the last of the dew from the undergrowth, they’re in the sparse trees dotting the broken rockscape above the plant setting traps and discussing ambushes, their quiet voices blending into the sounds of the mountain around them.

 

Naturally, it’s when Brad is just starting to relax his guard, is actually considering they call a break for lunch, that the piercing whine of a sniper’s bullet disrupts the calm and scatters the team, who take cover behind cedar trunks and boulders.

 

Brad himself is pinned to the ground behind a downed tree; by the sound of the bullets, the sniper is directly in front of them and within a range of one hundred meters.  He isn’t in a hurry, as is evident by the way he takes his time to line up a shot and looks for movement, waits for them to get cocky or restless.

 

Behind a rock twenty meters to Brad’s left, Samsoon peeks his head up; he gets a face full of rock shrapnel for his boldness.

 

Up the ridge another thirty meters, a second gun opens fire, the rapid rattle of an AK-47 peppering two of Darab’s men with cedar splinters.

 

They return fire judiciously, nursing their ammunition and watching for vulnerable targets.  

 

 

Another gun opens up, its bass, chest-thrumming noise raising the hairs on Brad’s neck:  Fuck if it doesn’t sound like an American M203.  The almost immediate explosion that follows the sound distracts Brad from determining make and model, especially when Darab lets out an eerie ululation and breaks cover long enough to spray with bullets the undergrowth hiding the grenadier.

 

Then it’s a free-for-all for several minutes, with both sides unleashing steady fire, with one notable exception:  From the impacts, Brad can tell the sniper is shifting his position and moving around to make Brad’s cover untenable.  

 

Carefully, Brad sights along his barrel, using the scope to narrow his field of vision and searching, as a long-ago shooting instructor taught him, for the thing that doesn’t belong.  He’s not going to catch the sniper moving but standing still—a finger, a corner of a helmet, the hem of a long tunic or toe of a boot.

 

He breathes, ignoring the bullets turning the trees around him to kindling, ignoring a second grenade that geysers a plume of dirt and rock shrapnel into the air fewer than ten meters from two of Darab’s men, who are sheltering behind a rock.

 

Brad ignores everything but the circle of landscape in his scope, moving it slowly along the path it’s most likely the sniper is taking.

 

The enemy is smart and has the advantage both of high ground and hard cover; the ridge up the way is strewn with boulders and criss-crossed with downed trees, their bare, skeletal branches interlocked, creating an almost impenetrable barrier.

 

But Brad is patient, and at his core is the coldness that always overtakes him in combat.  He smiles a little at the sound of the firefight and exhales a long, slow breath.

 

There.

 

Thirty meters up the hill, he sees what might be a shirt-tail, or maybe the frayed edge of a turban.  Since the rest of the man is blocked by the rock he’s lying behind, Brad will have to wait for movement before he can take the shot, so it doesn’t matter what part the sniper has revealed.  All that matters is that Brad is ready when he finally reveals a targetable part.

 

Brad flinches inadvertently as a bullet grazes the top of the trunk and showers him in splinters.  He feels them like needles in the meat of his cheeks, and when he looks down with the eye not lining up his scope, he can see a vague, dark shape, huge this close to his iris, that indicates how close he’d come to losing an eye.

 

He refocuses, ignoring Samsoon’s iteration of Darab’s cry, ignoring even one of the other team members flinging up a bloodied hand in a sign Brad doesn’t recognize.  Whatever it means, Darab answers with another wailing call.

 

The sniper moves at the same time that a frenzy of AK fire shreds the bark along the top of Brad’s hide, but he doesn’t duck, just closes his left eye to shield it from debris and breathes out on the squeeze as he takes the shot, catching the sniper high on the right side of his turban.  Absent any pink mist, Brad doesn’t think it was a kill shot, but the sniper slumps over his one outstretched arm and seems out of the action.

 

Meanwhile, the others on the team have worked their way another fifteen meters up the ridge toward the enemy’s position and have driven them over a rise and down into a hollow made by some ancient geological cataclysm.

 

“Hold!” he calls out, first in English and then in Pashto.  When it gets no response, he tries it in Dari, which does the trick.  The men hesitate, obviously eager for the chase, but eventually, they return, two of the unnamed men and Darab and Samsoon.  The fifth man is missing, Brad notes, a mystery solved almost immediately by Samsoon kneeling behind a boulder and waving a hand for the first aid kit that Brad’s carrying.

  
Brad tosses it to him and gestures for Darab to follow him.  The other two men cluster around their fallen comrade, offering advice—or maybe prayers—in their glottal tongue.  He and Darab climb to the sniper’s location, where he indicates that Darab should search the man while Brad keeps his gun trained on him.  It’s unlikely that he’s “playing possum”—that’s not a comfortable trick for them, culturally—but Brad’s learned never to second-guess his training.

 

In this instance, it proves unnecessary; the man is deeply unconscious, one pupil responding more sluggishly than the other when Brad pries his eyes open.

 

Darab gestures toward the man and says something harsh and rapid.

 

Brad doesn’t need to speak Dari to understand what’s being asked.

 

“No,” he says, putting steel into his voice, though the adrenaline dump has left him exhausted.  “We need him for interrogation.”

 

At Brad’s last word, Darab’s eyes alight with malignant mischief, and Brad finds himself saying, “No!” again even more forcefully.

 

“We’re taking him back to Shkin,” Brad clarifies, gesturing toward the Humvee parked out of sight on the other side of the plant.  He hopes the insurgents don’t have a second group waiting for them there.  He imagines having to dive for cover as they take fire from their own .50.

 

Darab gives Brad a long, hard look but eventually consents—at least, Brad assumes it’s consent.  In practice, it looks a lot like walking away.  The older Afghan oversees the others as they lift their wounded comrade and carry him down the hill.  Between them, the man’s face is grey as curdled milk, his hands fretting weakly at the edges of his khat.  The long, white shirt beneath it, filthy when he’d dismounted, is now discolored by a spreading stain of dark red.

 

Samsoon tries to hold a pressure bandage over the wound even as he attempts to support the man’s right shoulder.

 

Brad’s got the wounded enemy in a fireman’s carry.  In his right ear, he hears a breathy moan, but he only tightens his grip on the man and continues down the ridge.

 

In the back of the Humvee, classifications like enemy and ally are lost as the two wounded men are trundled in together, Samsoon crouching over his comrade to continue keeping pressure on the wound and one of the unwounded Afghan soldiers holding a gun on the unconscious sniper.

 

It’s a long drive back to the Alamo.

 

 

Once there, they triage the wounded soldier and stabilize him until a casevac chopper can arrive to take him to Khost.  The sniper they strap to a bed in medical.  He’s just coming around as the corpsman, inevitably called “Doc,” is cleansing his scalp wound and checking for signs of brain damage.

 

“Definitely concussed,” he concludes as the sniper mutters and tries to pull his head out of Doc’s gloved grip.  “Pupils are sluggish.  He’ll need to be on that chopper.”

 

Brad makes a noise under his breath, and Captain Taylor, who’s standing next to him, says, “You have until the chopper gets here.”  
  


At Brad’s raised eyebrow, Taylor adds, “Ten mikes.”

 

“I’ll go get a smoke,” Doc offers, heading toward the door in Taylor’s wake.

 

  
That leaves Brad alone with the sniper, which isn’t as helpful as it might seem on first flush.  

 

Brad can’t speak any of the languages this guy is likely to come out with.

 

Peeking his head out the door, Brad spots Reese at the makeshift outdoor weight room they use in their off-time.  Reese’s patrol was on stand-down pending vehicle inspection.

 

“Hey, Reese, is Ahmed around?”

 

Ahmed is one of three base translators and the one who Brad trusts the most.  Some interpreters Brad’s known have been absolutely loyal to the cause of ridding Afghanistan of Taliban insurgents; often, these men have sacrificed everything to work for ISAF.  They have to cover their faces to hide their identities and prevent their families from being targeted by the Taliban.  Ahmed is one of these.

 

But the other two ‘terps Brad’s worked with out of the Alamo have proven to be self-serving, hash-smoking slackers.  

 

Reese shrugs and wipes sweat from his neck.  “I don’t know.  You want me to find out?”

 

“Yeah, if he’s not here, get me one of the other ‘terps, but do it on the double.  I’ve got ten mikes.”

 

“Yessir,” Reese answers, and Brad hopes to god it’s simply exertion that’s painted the kid’s face a rosy flush and not some sort of misplaced admiration.  He really hates that hero shit.

 

Whatever his motivation, Reese proves as good as his word, and Ahmed is hustling into medical two minutes later.

 

Brad doesn’t waste time trying to get the guy to give up intel on his associates, the structure of his organization, his superiors, or the sources of their funding.  Even if he knows, he’s not going to tell Brad.

 

What Brad most wants to know is what flavor of bad guy the sniper is, and that’s easy enough.

 

“Ahmed, ask him why he attacked us at the old water plant.”

 

The conversation lasts longer than it would if it were happening in English, but Brad’s accustomed to the cultural differences, and he waits as patiently as he can, half expecting to hear the deep, rhythmic thrum of chopper blades approaching before the conversation is complete.

 

Ahmed looks up after a minute and says, “The Right Hand of Allah is God’s Righteous Force.”

 

“You heard of them?”

 

Ahmed shakes his head.  Afghan by birth, Pakistani by circumstance, Ahmed was one of the first to volunteer his services as a translator when FB Shkin was established.  He’s been there for years, according to Captain Taylor, handed down from commander to commander like an heirloom.

 

Rumor has it that Ahmed’s whole family was killed by Taliban insurgents hiding over the border in Pakistan and he sought revenge the only way he knew, by using his voice for the American cause.

 

“But that is nothing new.”

 

Unusually for his kind, the sniper starts talking before Brad can return his attention to the prone man.

 

Ahmed listens, face showing nothing; he’s good at hiding his feelings, Brad’s noticed.  He won’t be playing poker with Ahmed.

 

“He says that they will overrun the hills and drive the infidel from the land.  He says the doctor will be first as a sign that nothing is sacred but Allah, praised be His name.”

 

“What doctor?” Brad asks, but he’s pretty sure he already knows.

 

Before Ahmed can relay the question, however, two things happen at once:  The thump-thump-thump of an incoming chopper makes itself known, and the sniper cries out to Allah in a loud voice and bites down viciously on his own tongue.

 

Since Doc had been on his way to prep the prisoner for transport, he’s at the door before Brad can even react, shoving wadded gauze into the guy’s mouth and saying, “Get him up, up, up!”

 

Brad sees him onto the chopper, strapped opposite the Afghan soldier from the CTPT in training, and steps out of the way as the downwash coats him in gritty dust.

 

Taylor looks up when Brad taps on his open office door.

 

“Get anything?”

 

“Not much.  But, sir, I think Captain Fick might be in trouble.”  

 

Taylor’s eyes narrow in consideration, and he leans back in his chair, lacing his fingers behind his head and stretching his neck against them.

 

“You mean ‘Mr. Fick,’ don’t you, Brad?”

 

“No such thing as an ex-Marine, sir.”

 

“True enough.  But I think you reminded me of Fick’s former rank to get me to feel some sort of consonance with him.”

 

“Consonance, sir?  Big word.”

 

“I think you can handle it, Colbert.  Why don’t you try telling me why you think your friend’s in trouble.”

 

Brad tenses at Taylor’s word choice, but when he considers his tone, he can’t find any innuendo lurking there.

 

“Sniper said they were going to wipe the infidels from these hills, sir.  Starting with the doctor.  Only one doctor I can think of that he might be talking about.”

 

“Fick’s no doctor.”  Taylor’s tone is careful, but Brad can detect disdain somewhere underneath the casual observation.

 

“No, sir, he’s not.  And we both know it.  I still think it’s our responsibility to pass the intel on.”

 

“So use the SAT link.  I’m told there might be an emergency protocol in place for the civilian aid worker in Ghar Waale.”  Taylor all but throws up a pair of finger quotes around the words civilian and aid.

 

Brad resists the urge to snort.  Fucking spy shit.  He hates it.

 

“I think this is news best delivered in person, sir.”

 

“Why’s that?”

 

“If there are more of these guys in the hills watching Nate, they might think twice if a patrol shows up.”

 

“Yeah, or they might take it as the perfect opportunity to kill everyone in the village for giving aid to the infidel enemy just as soon as you and your team drive away.”

 

“Okay, then, I’ll take the Red Cross truck.”

 

But Taylor’s already shaking his head.

 

Brad forestalls his inevitable refusal by plowing ahead with his reasoning.

 

“Look, the truck could cement Fick’s reputation with the locals—.”

 

“I think you meant to say ‘cover’.”  Taylor’s voice is dry as a shamal wind.

 

“Cement his reputation,” Brad continues as though he hasn’t just been interrupted—indeed, as if he’s not one wrong word away from insubordination.  “And give me a chance to compare notes in person about this insurgent group.  See if they aren’t the ones he’s dealing with.”

 

They both hear the double-play on the word “deal.”  
  


Taylor’s face twists.  “That’s pretty thin, Colbert.  Why didn’t you just say you wanted to see your girlfriend?”

 

 

“If I thought that would’ve worked, sir…”  Brad smirks.  He refuses to react to Taylor’s taunt, recognizing it for the smack-slinging bullshit that is a patented trademark of Marines the world over and not a sly suggestion about Brad’s true motivations.

 

Brad is a Marine; he’s not going to visit Nate for any other reasons than to deliver sensitive intel and aid an ally in furthering his mission.

 

“Fine…the CTPT is currently on hold while they’re a man down, and I’m sending Will out with Suarez again tomorrow.  You should have a new-to-you Humvee by the day following, latest.  I’m giving you a day of leave.  What you do with it is your own business.”

 

Taylor’s tone indicates that he’s practicing plausible deniability in its purest form.

 

“The req form for the truck?”

 

Taylor blinks at him innocently.  “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Sergeant Colbert.”

 

“Yessir.  Thank you, sir.”

 

“Don’t thank me, Colbert.  I’ve just thrown you in with the cold water sharks.  You think _you’re_ made of ice…”

 

He waves a hand by way of dismissal, and Brad exits, mind already on plans and supplies.  He tells himself his suddenly racing heart and the shiver of anticipation running down his back are both the products of the temperature shift from Taylor’s fan-cooled office to the considerably warmer ambient temperature of the outdoors.

 

If he doesn’t believe himself, at least there’s no one else to notice the lie.

 

**16 April 2006.  1330 local time.  Ghar Waale.  Bermel District, Paktika Province, Afghanistan.**

 

Nate feels a twinge along his lower back as he straightens up and leans a forearm against the hoe, using the back of the wrist of his free hand to wipe sweat from his forehead.  His hands are clammy in the goatskin gloves, his face gritty with dust blown up by the occasional breeze that crosses the stream and carries into the field where he’s working.

 

He’d spent the morning working in a mud brick hut three north of his own, a building that had once belonged to a family—father, mother, two sons and a daughter.  They’d moved away from Ghar Waale when their youngest son, Khushdil, had been killed while they were visiting the village from which Firebase Shkin took its name.  There’d been a suicide bombing outside a general store where NATO forces liked to shop for local food and foreign news, and the family, who’d been eating kebab at an open air market nearby, had suffered the terrible, but not remotely uncommon, anguish of a murdered child.

 

They’d fled to Pakistan, to live with the mother, Narenja’s, extended family, cousins whom they had not met in person but upon whom they had set their hopes.

 

It’s a familiar story to Nate.

 

The house would make a good medical aid station.  He’d cleared it of debris weeks ago and had been working steadily at putting up braces for shelves, running wiring for the generator he eventually hoped to bring in, and had even built a generator shed on the south wall of the house.

 

It was an elaborate effort to establish cover, even by thorough-going Company standards.

 

Nate wasn’t doing it for his cover.

 

Today, he’d been called away from his work—affixing a ceiling fan he’d bought used in Khost the last time he’d been there—to help with an irrigation gate that had swollen shut over the winter months.

 

Then, Roshin and Saba, the wife and sister, respectively, of Kushan, had beckoned him into the fields, which they were turning to plant maize.  Nate privately thought it was a little ironic that Kushan meant “hard-working” in Pashto, a fact he’d learned from the sly Saba, who’d cast him a sidelong glance as she’d said it.  Kushan was content—as a few of the men in Ghar Waale were—to let the women do the hard labor of preparing and tending the fields.

 

Saba, who’d spent her teen years living with relatives in Kandahar, where she’d gone to school and had planned to be a teacher someday, spoke limited English but always seemed to have the words for a joke or a jibe, usually at her brother’s expense.

 

She’d even had a boyfriend once, Nate had discovered, a Syrian named Farooq.  He’d fled Kandahar in 1998, after Farooq and Saba and the whole neighborhood had been ordered by the Taliban, who held power over the city, to the soccer stadium to witness the execution of the man who sold them bread and pastries and always had an extra something sweet for a pretty girl like Saba.  He’d been accused of drinking alcohol and gambling, both false charges and both punishable by death.

 

Saba had returned home to Ghar Waale shortly thereafter, her relatives telling her she’d be safer there.

 

They themselves had moved to Pakistan shortly before the American invasion in 2001.

 

Everyone has stories like Saba’s.  

 

There are few families that haven’t been fractured by the almost constant war of the past three decades of Afghan history.

 

Kushan himself comes ambling along the road just then to grin at Nate and make a gesture that, though peculiarly Afghan in origin, needs no translation.  It means that Nate is whipped, a charge he takes with a grin of his own and a shrug, as if to say, _Who am I to resist the charms of your lovely sister?_    

 

Saba stifles a laugh against her sleeve and says, “Eat,” to Nate.

 

As if recognizing her word, Nate’s stomach rumbles loudly, raising another smothered laugh, this time from both women.

 

Kushan harangues the women good-naturedly, probably to get back to work, and claps Nate on the shoulder as Nate passes him the hoe.  It’s clear from the man’s expression that he has no intention of using the tool, but Nate can’t help but make the point.

 

Nate hears the women talking to each other and Kushan calling to the men working on the irrigation system, and though he catches only a word or two what he hears makes him smile.  Despite the destructive grind of war, the constant companions of hunger and doubt, these people find reasons for joy.

 

It’s a lesson he often thinks he could stand to learn himself.

  
He’s drawn from his navel-gazing by the sound of feet approaching at a run.  Instinctively, he reaches for the gun he keeps concealed at his ankle, a lethal little P32.  In his baggy cargo pants, the gun is virtually invisible.  The only time he takes it off is when he sleeps (it goes on the ground beneath the mattress where he sleeps, within easy reach) and when he’s entering FB Shkin.  

 

Nate’s been half-expecting something to happen today.  Though he’d off-loaded the test weapons in a secret location eighteen klicks from Ghar Waale and had taken extraordinary pains to assure that no one had been watching him do it, he still worries that someone had seen him—or that someone at FB Shkin let the word slip.

 

He’s been a spy long enough to know that most people in the business die because of someone else’s mistake.

 

So when the runner rounds the curve in the narrow road, Nate’s already tucked into a shadowed declivity in the rock face of the steep-sided ravine through which the road runs.  Here, the creek is forced through a narrow channel of rock, and the rushing of the water blurs the sound of the approaching feet.  Nate waits, forcing himself to breathe calmly and evenly, gun in his steady hands aimed at the place where the runner must pass him.

  
He recognizes Turan seconds before the boy senses Nate in his hiding spot and freezes.

 

“Sir, it is I, Turan,” the boy calls out.

 

Nate has tucked the gun away again before he tells the boy to turn around.

 

“A man has come to see you,” Turan rushes to say, ignoring the usual pleasantries of his people to get right to the message he’s clearly been sent to deliver.  “A white man, like you.  Pale and tall.”

 

Nate feels a flutter in his chest and a wave of heat flush his face and neck.  He tells himself it’s only the adrenaline let-down after Turan had startled him, but Nate tries to be honest with himself since so much of the rest of his life is taken up by lying, and he knows it’s hope that’s making him warm.

 

If you’d asked him a few minutes ago how Nate felt about hope, he’d have laughed, a dry sound with no humor in it.

 

He hasn’t had much reason to hope.  Nigeria had taught him that lesson.  He’d known it was Company policy to disavow all knowledge of captured operatives.  He’d signed the paperwork himself.  That didn’t change the fact that he’d hoped for two weeks that rescue would come, hoped through bloody stools and red urine, through weeping wounds already rank with infection.  Through sleep deprivation and heated knives and flayed feet and the agony of unquenched thirst and the surety that he wasn’t going to die nearly quickly enough to prevent himself from cracking and spilling out his little knowledge to satisfy the bloated, awful faces of his killers.

 

But now, one thought that Brad might have come to his village, that he might be even now waiting for Nate in front of Nate’s house…

 

Damned if it isn’t hope kindling a guttering flame in the region of his heart.

 

*****

 

Brad’s nervous.  There’s a fluttering in his chest and a tickle when he tries to take a deep breath, the kind he sometimes gets when he’s riding his bike full out and the wind robs him of the chance to breathe.  He feels a little like he’s going too fast, like he might lose control at the first curve Nate throws him.

 

Like maybe he shouldn’t have come.

 

_Quit being a whining fourth-grade kickball reject_ , _Colbert,_ he tells himself.   _What exactly do you think is going to happen here?_

 

Wrong question.  Brad’s face is flushed with heat when Nate comes into view, walking beside the boy, Turan, who’d offered to take Brad’s message to Nate.

 

Nate is turned toward Turan, listening as the boy speaks, his scarred face animated, eyes bright with clear admiration for Nate.  Nate’s attention is entirely for the boy, and he’s leaning a little toward him, his whole focus the boy’s story.

 

Nate looks impossibly young, younger even than he had in Iraq.  His shoulders are broader, his build has filled out, and around his eyes and mouth are lines that weren’t there three years ago, but with this expression on his face…

 

Brad shakes off the feeling of someone running a finger down his spine.

 

_Get a fucking grip._

 

Nate turns to look at Brad, and for a split second he’s still wearing the open, avid look he’d given the boy.  Then it’s gone in a blink, as if in closing his eyes he’d drawn a curtain over it.  In its place is an older Nate that Brad isn’t sure he really knows.  On this man’s face is the carefully schooled look of a master interrogator.

 

Or someone who’s been interrogated.

 

Brad hasn’t forgotten that moment when they’d seen each other again for the first time at the Alamo.  Nate had held himself still as if suppressing a shiver when Brad had made a casual joke about torture.

 

The kind of casual joke they’d all have made—even Nate—back in Iraq.

 

Not so casual anymore, Brad guesses.

 

“What brings you all this way, Brad?”

 

“Figured you could use the company, but I see you have a friend already.”  
  


Turan, who’s fallen silent in the presence of a stranger, seems pleased to have been included in the conversation.

 

“Kochai, sir, can I bring anything for you and your friend?”

 

Vaguely, Brad wonders what kind of services the boy is offering.  Then he reminds himself that this is a small, isolated rural village, not Kandahar, for Christ’s sake.  Probably, the boy meant the runny, sour yogurt they drink in these parts, or maybe some figs or sweet nuts.

 

“Thank you, Turan, but we have plenty.”  Brad watches as Nate deftly negotiates a coin into the boy’s hand.  “Thank you also for delivering the message.  Shúker.”

 

With a shy wave at Brad and a broader smile for Nate, the boy skips away.  Three doors down, Brad sees two dark heads and two sets of dark eyes bright with curiosity peeking around the frame at him.  When he smiles in their direction, the faces disappear.

 

“That’s Roshan and his sister, Laila.  They’ll work their way up to asking you for candy if you stay long enough.”

 

“Am I?”  Brad asks.  It’s a bullshit move, putting it on Nate like that, and by the expression on Nate’s face, he’s about to call Brad on it.

 

Brad interrupts with a gesture before Nate can say a word.  “I’ve got a day’s leave.”

 

“So you thought you’d take in some of the lovely, scenic, IED-riddled back roads of war-torn Afghanistan in a—”  Brad watches as Nate does a deliberate back-and-forth of his—admittedly odd—vehicle.  “—a repurposed Soviet Jeep?”

 

The Jeep has the ubiquitous red cross on its hood and doors, not exactly the factory original paint job.

 

“Sure.  A few potholes, some sniper fire, a picnic lunch.”  Brad enjoys it, the teasing, particularly for the way it strips the years from Nate’s face, making him look more like the man Brad knew back in Iraq—stressed, yeah, and cautious, maybe, but still Nate.

 

Brad feels that flutter in his ribcage again and changes the subject.

 

“Actually, I have a question and a message. Did he call you Koshay?”

 

Nate chuckles dryly and shakes his head.  “Kochai,” he says, pronouncing it with exaggerated care.  “It means wanderer.  Nomad.”

 

Brad can’t help raking his eyes over Nate’s lean form.  He’s still got the runner’s build, still the sharp eyes that seem to take in everything.  Gone is the way those eyes could say a hundred things to Brad without Nate’s lips ever having to get in on the action.

 

“Nomad, huh?  It fits.”

 

Brad doesn’t think it’s a sudden heat-flash that washes Nate’s face in pink.

 

“Second?”  Nate prompts, raising an eyebrow as if in challenge.

 

 

 

“This is better delivered in private.”

 

As soon as the words are out, Brad realizes how they can be taken, and Nate does too, if the slight hitch in his breathing is a reliable tell.  Brad is almost dizzy with the sudden onset of want, of wishing he meant it the other way, the more interesting way.

 

Instead, he has to shake his head regretfully and slap on a rueful smile.  He’s rueful alright, but not for the double entendre, only for the fact that he’s probably not going to deliver on it.

 

“It’s sensitive,” Brad elaborates.  “Dangerous.”

 

Once again, an older, grimmer man is looking out from Nate’s familiar face.  Nate nods once, sharply, and gestures toward a mud brick house at the end of the row where Brad’s parked.  It backs up to the mountain, seems to grow out of it, in fact, and Brad wonders how old it is, if the bricks outdate the Soviet antique he’s driving.

 

He thinks they probably lap the Jeep by at least a couple of centuries.

 

“I’ve got some boxes here,” Brad offers, indicating the tailgate of the Jeep.

 

Nate comes over and looks in at the unmarked cardboard collection and raises an eyebrow again.  Maybe he hasn’t lost his whole ability to speak in looks, Brad thinks.

 

“Gauze, pressure bandages, field dressings, tourniquets.  A dozen Harlequin romances and a Christmas tree even Charlie Brown would’ve passed over.  You know, the usual good will package.”

 

“Are you…protecting my cover?” Nate asks in an almost-whisper.

  
Brad ignores the way it sends a frisson of desire shooting down to his belly.  It sounds a lot like the voice Nate used in Gunny Wynn’s hallway, the voice that taunted Brad into kissing him that first time.  

 

“Figured it wouldn’t do for me to show up looking like a Marine,” Brad explains.

 

Nate gives him an eyebrow that suggests his feelings on the subject. It says quite clearly, _Brad “The Iceman” Colbert always looks like a Marine._

 

But he says out loud, “Well, as it happens, I do have the beginnings of an aid station.” 

 

Nate picks up three boxes and Brad carries the rest and follows him down the one street of the village toward another mud brick building, this one a third again as large as the one to which Nate had been headed originally.

 

Inside, Brad sees exposed wires where a fixture is obviously meant to hang, newly-hung shelves, four metal bed-frames absent mattresses, an ancient gurney so decrepit it might’ve come from a nineteenth century asylum.  

 

Nate stacks the boxes neatly on one of the shelves and turns to take the ones out of Brad’s hands.  “Thank you,” he says as he works.  “This stuff is great.  It’ll really come in handy.”

 

“For when the doctors arrive?” Brad asks, and if it sounds little bitter, he can’t be blamed for that.  It’s not he who chose a life of dissembling and subterfuge.

 

Nate shoots him a look, wary and uncertain, and Brad hates himself a little for putting it there until he remembers that he’s not the one to blame for where they’ve ended up.  That’s all on Nate.

 

“For when there’s need,” Nate says, his tone carefully devoid of inflection.  

 

“Are you actually trained in medicine?”

 

Nate shrugs.  “Advanced field medicine training and six weeks’ interning at Walter Reed.”

 

“All that to fool some backward, illiterate Hajis?”  Brad uses the last word deliberately.  He feels the ugly curl to his lip.

 

Nate’s disapproval bears the same weight it used to—Brad feels it.  But he doesn’t respond as he might once have; he’s not being led by his dick or his heart anymore.  There are men counting on him to get what he can out of Nate.  Maybe it’ll be a kind of torture for both of them, but Brad’s willing to make the sacrifice.

 

“All _that_ ,” Nate enunciates crisply, “To help anyone in need of aid while I’m working as a representative for Medecins sans Frontieres.”

 

“You saying there’s actually going to be a doc here at some point?”

 

Nate gives him a steady, cold look, the kind spooks use in place of answers.  

 

“Classified,” Brad says eventually, like he’d say “POG” or “Schwetje.”

 

“You said you had something to tell me?”  Nate turns away from Brad and busies himself with rearranging the medical supplies.  Brad reads in his shoulders the tension he’s feeling and is perversely glad to know he’s had an effect.

 

“Actually, two things, maybe related.  A lieutenant at Shkin—,” Brad deliberately avoids calling McGivens “my” lieutenant.  As far as Brad’s concerned, there’s only ever been one man who earned that pronoun.  “—warned me about you.  Said you might be a spook.  Said he’d heard scuttlebutt at Bagram.”

 

Nate’s shoulders tighten, but he doesn’t turn around or say anything, so Brad continues.

 

“You heard of _The Right Hand of Allah is God’s Righteous Force?_ ”

 

“Death metal?” Nate asks, his back still to Brad, and it takes Brad a second longer than it once would have for him to realize Nate’s made a joke.

 

“Name like that can only be thrash,” Brad answers, covering the awkward pause with an especially insouciant drawl.  It’s his best kind.

 

“Got into a little skirmish with some foreign jihadists this morning out by the old Russian water plant.  Captured a sniper.  He said The Right Hand of Allah, et cetera, are going to ‘drive the infidels from the land.’”

 

Nate snorts and turns around, giving Brad a smirk.  “Did you tell him to get in line?”

 

Brad shakes his head.  “Couldn’t, what with all the bleeding and screaming he was doing.”

 

Nate’s flinch would be indiscernible to anyone who wasn’t looking for it, but since Brad had seeded that image for the very purpose of raising a reaction, he catches the way the corner of Nate’s mouth tightens reflexively.

 

“I shot him in the ambush,” Brad explains, then, willing to cut Nate some slack for thinking Brad maybe tortured a confession out of the guy.

 

Nate’s expression doesn’t clear so much as it relaxes a micrometer.  Someone else—Poke, say—might’ve read it as displeasure.  Brad knows it’s relief.

 

“Sniper said something else.”  Brad leaves it there, waiting.

 

Nate’s face makes it clear he isn’t going to ask. _I can wait all day_ , he’s saying.  Brad had seen that look of disguised impatience directed at any number of enlisted men in their time together in Iraq.

 

Brad swallows past the thrill chasing through his chest at the conversation they’re not having.

 

_Not a twelve-year-old girl_ , he reminds himself sternly.

 

“Sniper said, ‘the doctor will be first as a sign that nothing is sacred but Allah, blah, blah, blah.’”

 

“What, ‘ve you got Ray as your translator now?”

 

Another joke.  Brad wonders if maybe the afternoon might be salvaged after all.

 

“Just the usual addenda, sir,” Brad drawls, smirking at using Nate’s title, smirking harder at the Nate Fick equivalent of an eye roll.  “All praise Allah, the one true God, and—.”  

 

Nate waves the rest of the translation off with a hand, his eyes losing focus as he starts taking apart the intel and fitting it into the picture he already has.  Brad watches the process, as admiring now as he was three years and a different war ago. 

 

It might’ve been obvious to him even back then, if he’d thought about it, how much sense it made for a mind like Nate’s to be turned toward counterintelligence.  

 

“This isn’t a surprise to you,” Brad says after a minute of watching Nate think.  Nate’s eyes return to Brad’s face with a startling sharpness that shoots a jolt of recognition through Brad’s body.  Never mind that he’s told himself he won’t be swayed by those eyes—the weight of them is almost palpable, like a touch or a breath.

 

Or a kiss.

 

Nate’s closer than Brad remembers him being only moments before, though he’d swear Nate hadn’t moved.  Either Nate’s gotten ninja spy skills since Iraq or Brad’s situational awareness is compromised by Nate’s proximity.

 

And the rare opportunity their relative solitude provides.

 

As if thinking it has charged the air with possibility, Nate takes in an audible breath and Brad watches as a sunrise blush spreads across Nate’s cheeks.  He wonders if the flush of blood beneath Nate’s skin would be hot under his tongue, and he has a second to consider how crazy that is before Nate’s closing the gap between them and brushing the most tentative of dry kisses along Brad’s chapped lips.

 

“No,” Brad croaks, a harsh sound that surprises them both.  “No,” he says again, a little stronger, taking in a ragged breath and stepping back, putting three feet between them in an instant.

 

“Not this time.  I need answers, Nate.  I need to know what the fuck is going on with you.  You don’t get to fuck me stupid and then send me away this time.”

 

Brad doesn’t think Nate is faking the stricken look, nor the way his shoulders drop and his chin comes up simultaneously, a kind of surrender and defiance in one.

 

“Is that what you—?” he starts.  “You think I…”  Nate seems to be struggling for words, but Brad will be damned if he’ll offer any as a lifeline.  Let him flail in the deep water for awhile, see how he likes it.  Brad had spent enough time treading water and waiting for the sharks to start circling him.

 

“I didn’t send you anywhere, Brad.  You were _deploying_.”

 

“Nice,” Brad says, making the word as cold as he can manage it.  “Did Harvard teach you evasion or did you learn it at Langley?”

 

Nate makes a frustrated sound, a blown-out breath, and turns half away from Brad, pacing the distance to the far wall and then back again, hands clenching and unclenching.  It’s the closest Brad’s seen to Nate undone since that night all those years ago.

 

Nate stops short and opens his mouth, eyes bright with something—anguish, Brad thinks, or regret—when a movement at the door has them both reaching for their concealed guns.

 

Turan’s eyes are wide where his face breaks the gloom of the hut, the rest of him indistinct, just a paper cut-out against the backlight of mid-afternoon behind him.

 

“Kochai, sir, Grandfather asks if you will bring your friend for tea.”

 

Nate nods once, and Brad watches as he packs away his feelings, replacing them with a bland, encouraging smile, which he turns on Brad.

 

“Tea?”

 

Brad shrugs.  He knows enough about the customs of the region to know that such hospitality is inevitable.  He only hopes they don’t spend hours with the old man.  He has things he still needs to say to Nate—things he needs Nate to hear.

 

“Why not?” he answers, making it clear that there are a thousand reasons, none of which he’ll voice.  Most silent of all is the secret thought that tea will wash the phantom taste of Nate from his mouth.  Brad licks his lower lip reflexively, hating himself a little as he watches Nate’s eyes track the movement, and then gestures for Nate to lead the way out of the aid station toward Atal’s house.

 

It’s going to be a long afternoon.

 

*****

 

Atal is an impressive old bastard, Brad will give him that.  Lean and hawkish, with piercing, bright brown eyes that miss nothing, Turan’s grandfather might’ve been a sniper once.  He certainly has the focus and patience.

 

Seventy-five minutes into tea, provided by his shy wife, Panra, Atal has managed to bring up Brad’s occupation four times.

 

“Sir, have you any access to satellite?”  Turan, in his role as translator, holds his hand up against his ear, as though talking into a SAT phone.

 

Brad shrugs.  Privately, he reevaluates the scope of Atal’s knowledge; a simple, rural farmer wouldn’t be aware of nor interested in SAT technology.  Either he’s working for the insurgents, or he’s spent some time fighting against them in a former life, when they were called something else—different war, same motives.

 

Either way, Brad figures the safe answer is evasion: “I can ask to use them at Shkin.  But I haven’t got one of my own.”

 

“Brad’s a lot like me, except he works for UNAMA,” Nate explains—for the third time.

 

“I scout for possible well sites, clinic locations, assess the needs of villages like this one.  Basically, I’m the first line of inquiry for potential aid to under-developed communities.”  He catches himself talking like an NGO rep and has to suppress a smirk.

 

In fact, neither Medecins Sans Frontieres nor UNAMA has aid workers in this region of Afghanistan.  The violence of the insurgency coupled with the increased militarization of the region had forced all but a hardy—maybe _fool_ hardy—few NGOs out of the region earlier that year.  

 

It’s just the ISAF and their enemies now.  One big unhappy, totally fucked up family.  He and Nate are both counting on the people of Ghar Waale not having gotten that particular memo.

 

“So, no phone?” Turan persists, apparently on his own.  Atal sits stone-faced and cross-legged on a matted pillow across from Brad, who’s folded himself uncomfortably, one knee cocked, teacup balanced precariously there with his left hand—out of habit, he keeps his right hand, his shooting hand, free.

 

Atal’s eyes take in Brad’s uneasy posture, the calluses on his hands, what hair he can see under Brad’s anonymous (non-regulation) boonie.  Brad’s pretty sure the old man knows Brad’s not really an NGO rep.

 

He’s also pretty sure Nate’s cover’s been blown for a while.

 

That raises some unpleasant questions:  What does Atal hope to get for his discretion?  Or is Nate worth more if he’s handed over?  Brad’s uneasiness over Nate’s role in Ghar Waale grows.

 

Brad shifts in place a little and earns a sidewise look from Nate.  It’s rude to seem uncomfortable, Brad knows.  They’re maybe halfway through this meet-and-greet, and he’d better settle.  

 

Historically, Brad’s held much more uncomfortable positions for much longer periods of time.  He’s a Recon marine and a sniper, for fuck’s sake.

 

But he can feel time trickling away from them like sand down his back, and it’s making him restless.  They have unfinished business, he and Nate, and Atal’s interrogation is interrupting, goddamnit.

 

As if sensing Brad’s true line of thought, Atal smiles and bows his head, offers words that by tone alone indicate dismissal.

 

Turan translates, flattery mixed with sly suggestions about Brad’s true purpose for visiting them, and then, at last, he’s unfolding himself from the hard-packed dirt floor and nodding, offering his own, carefully enunciated, parting words in Pashto.

 

Nate follows him out a few moments later, his eyes fixed in the middle distance, brow furrowed.

 

“What?” Brad asks, but Nate shakes his head, as if to say, _Not here, not now_.

 

But Brad’s about at the bottom of his storied stock of patience, and he wants answers.  

 

He intends to get them.

 

Which is why it’s a surprise to him when the first thing out of his mouth as they clear the door to what is, apparently, Nate’s house is, “Can the old man be trusted?”

 

By Nate’s expression, candid for the moment before he replaces surprise with caution, Nate wasn’t expecting that question either.

 

“He hasn’t betrayed me so far.”  It’s flippant, the words and the tone, and Brad clenches his hands almost involuntarily as if he could physically hold back the flood of things he wants to say—to shout, in fact—at Nate.

 

“Can the cool spy bullshit,” he says instead.  “That’s not an answer and you know it.”

 

Nate’s shrug is weary, his face suddenly the old man mask Brad had noticed in unguarded moments before.  Or maybe this is the real Nate, not a mask at all, and the others—equanimous, easygoing, immoveable—maybe those are the facades.

 

“I can trust him about as well as I can trust anyone else in this country.”

 

Brad wants—maybe expects—him to add, “Present company excluded.”  Nate doesn’t.

 

“He did make a point of warning me that there has been an increase in insurgent movements in the hills around us.”  Nate makes a sweeping gesture toward the mountains invisible from the dim interior of his little mud brick house.

 

As if sensing Brad’s assessment of the space, Nate lights an oil lamp he’d borrowed from Panra and then grimaces, like he’s only just remembered.

“Sorry.  I haven’t had much time to replace my stuff.”

 

Brad takes in the splintered pile of kindling that must’ve been furniture once, now stacked beside the fireplace.  The wrecked table and plundered mattress, the confetti hastily brushed into a dusty heap near the remains of a clay pot…

 

“What the fuck happened here?”

 

“I had a visit.  Or rather, Turan and Atal did.  The bad guys sent me a message.”

 

Brad’s look is his only prompt, but Nate nods as though Brad had commanded him.

 

“I got a night letter.  The night I came to Shkin.  They smacked Turan around some, ransacked my place, and left a note.”  Nate rummages in the pile on the floor, pulls out a thin piece of unlined paper, smudged around the edges with dirty fingerprints.

 

Brad doesn’t need to know Pashto to know what it says.

 

“You think it’s the same people the sniper told me about?” And just like that, Brad has put aside his personal feelings, their shared baggage.  His mind is working through the problem, searching for solutions.  Going the same places Nate’s has, if the look in his eyes is any tell.

 

“Probably.”  Nate says it like he’s sure, never mind the word’s traditional definition.  “Doesn’t matter, though.  I’ve got a mission.”

 

“Does the mission involve sacrificing yourself on the altar of oxymoronic ‘military intelligence’ stupidity?”

 

Nate gives him a hard look, but the weariness is still there at the corner of his eyes and in the way his mouth turns down at the corners.  Brad wants to take Nate’s face between his hands and draw him in, kiss away that expression, the one that makes him look like he’s seen too much and knows too much.

  
It occurs to Brad then that Nate might see the same thing on his own face.  

 

Instead of touching Nate, Brad looks right back, eyes unwavering, expression closed.  He’s waiting for more—more answers, more assurances—something, _anything_ that will help him help Nate.

 

Because it doesn’t matter what’s happened between them.  Years and lifetimes may have passed, but Nate will always be a brother Marine, and Brad’s not going to abandon him simply because it hurts every time he watches Nate put walls between them.

 

He’s not a pussy or a quitter.

 

Eventually, Nate seems to relent, something in the set of his shoulders shifting almost imperceptibly.  To anyone else, it would’ve been invisible.  But Brad was waiting for it.

 

Nate’s decided to let Brad in.  It’s as good as a surrender, and a hot thrill shoots through Brad then, electric promise purling down his veins and pooling in his belly.  It’s followed immediately by a cold shock of fear.  Brad’s been here before, at the intersection of hope and confusion.  Then, Nate had left him speechless and aching, uncertain in a way he hadn’t been in a lot of years.

 

It’s not an experience he cares to have a second time, especially not in a war zone.

 

Brad must make a noise, maybe the breath leaves his lips a little harder than he’d intended, and he catches a change in Nate’s expression, a subtle shift that says he’s caught on to Brad’s suspicion.

 

Brad expects to see the walls go up, that Nate will square his shoulders and put on his nothing-to-see-here face and they’ll be back to pat talk and meaningless blather before he has time to rethink his position.

 

Instead, Nate takes a step into Brad’s space, his eyes luminous in the dim yellow light cast by the oil lamp.  He doesn’t need to be so close as he passes Brad by and closes the door.  There’s no mistaking the tease, no doubt about the way Nate lets his arm brush across Brad’s chest as he passes.

 

“Have you heard about Pashtun men?”

 

Brad’s harsh, short bark of a laugh answers Nate’s question, but Nate goes on like Brad hadn’t answered.

 

“They don’t care, so long as the door’s closed and we can all pretend in the morning that I’m no less of a man for taking it from you.”

 

“Is that what you think is going to happen here?” Brad asks, wishing the sudden roughness in his voice wasn’t betraying how Nate’s words have wound him up.

 

Nate shrugs, a study in casual disinterest, but Brad can read him better now that the light is dim, an irony not lost on him.  It had been hard to see that night in Mike Wynn’s hallway, too.

 

Nate’s scared, which comes as something of a revelation to Brad, who’s used to imagining he is the only one of them who has reason to be afraid.

 

But he’s not playing games here, not letting this be another moment of fire followed by years of cold ash.  

 

“You saying I’m a sure thing, Nate?”  And he lets it sound bitter, like maybe it’s something he’s spent time thinking.  

 

Nate’s expression changes again, undergoes a series of readjustments, ending in a satisfying way on a kind of pained disbelief.

 

“You were never just a quick fuck, Brad.”

 

Nate flinches at Brad’s laugh this time, and Brad is glad, despite the way his stomach is growing cold and sick with the sounds he’s making, with the way his lip is twisted up in a mockery of a smile.

 

“You weren’t,” Nate insists, holding up a hand like he’s trying to stop the flow of traffic, the ten-ton load Brad hurls at him threatening to crush him without pause.

 

“Really?  And what clues did you leave for me, exactly, that I might deduce otherwise, _sir_?”

 

Nate jerks a little, like he’s been struck by a low-caliber bullet, and turns to pace towards the fireplace, where he stops with his hands against the narrow stone mantelpiece and drop his head between his elbows.

 

Brad watches Nate’s shoulders rising and falling as he marshals himself, and his stomach flips, acid churning up his throat as his satisfaction at finally, finally purging himself of the hurt curdles in his stomach.  

 

What he hears next pulls his attention from the sickness in his belly and the creeping sensation of doom rising from the ground beneath his boots like flood water slowly overcoming him.

 

“I was scared.”

 

It’s barely a whisper, but Nate’s confession breaks the silence of the room as if it could echo off the mountains around them.

 

Nate pushes himself wearily away from the mantel and turns to face Brad, something like defeat shadowing his eyes, like it’s cost him more than he’d expected to say those three words.

 

But he repeats them, belying the words’ meaning and proving what Brad’s always believed:  Nate Fick is one of the bravest people he’s ever known.

 

“I’d never…” Nate takes a deep breath that rocks his body like a buffeting wind.  “I’d never felt that way before, that…strongly.  That much.  It scared the shit out of me.  And I figured you’d be re-deploying, figured you’d never want to have to make a choice between the Marines and me.  I—.”

 

“ _Don’t_.  Don’t put it on me, Nate.  You could’ve talked to me.  Could’ve asked me what _I_ wanted.”

 

“I _know_.”  Nate’s voice rises, and they both look toward the door as though expecting the shout to invite interference from without.  With visible effort, Nate modulates his tone.  “I know.  I didn’t mean to make it sound like I’m blaming you.  I never blamed you, Brad.  I just figured it’d be easier for both of us if I was strong enough at the time to walk away.”

 

“For an educated man you’ve figured a lot of things wrong.”

 

It’s Nate’s turn to laugh, a dry and bitter sound that deadens on the air between them.

 

“How do you think I ended up here?”  Nate indicates with a gesture that takes in not just the current situation between the two of them but the wreck of his room, the village, the wadi, the whole clusterfuck of Afghanistan.

 

“How _did_ you end up here?”  And they both know Brad’s not talking about their relationship.

 

Brad watches Nate consider deflection, watches as he constructs a series of lies like a grave to keep him below the line of fire and out of Brad’s sight.

 

And then Nate says, “I missed this.”

 

“What, the high-class accommodations and cultural opportunities?”

 

Nate’s grin is a ghostly thing, there and then gone.  “Missed making an actual difference.  For guys on the ground.  The other ops weren’t…”  He makes a dismissive gesture, half to indicate the secrecy of his work, half to suggest it was all horseshit anyway.  “This mission was supposed to make a difference for soldiers.  I wanted to help.”

 

“Hell, Nate, if you’d wanted to be a Marine again, I’m sure we could’ve worked something out.”

 

Nate shakes his head.  “I didn’t want to be a Marine.  I didn’t want to have to accept short-sighted decisions from higher up the chain of command.  I didn’t want to watch while foreign policy designed by Ivy League alumni in comfortable conference rooms in D.C. decided life for the average grunt over here.  Within the parameters of my job description, I have a lot more freedom.  I thought it would make a bigger difference.”

 

“How is it possible that you’ve retained so much of that foolish idealism of yours after all this time working for the government?”  Brad’s voice is a mixture of wonder and admonition, and Nate’s answering smile is appropriately rueful.

 

“Yeah, well, like you said, my figuring sucks.”

 

And like that, they’ve had enough of personal revelations and painful emotional epiphanies.  Like that, Brad’s smirk turns lascivious.

 

“At least some part of you does…”

 

Nate’s eyebrow shoots up and then a flush races up his face from his neck, and then he’s licking his lips nervously and assessing Brad’s expression as if there might be a hidden explosive somewhere in Brad’s blatantly obvious—and really quite terrible—come-on line.

 

“As far as I know, Brad,” Nate says, serious look marred by the devilish glint at the corners of his eyes, “You haven’t gotten a broad enough sample to make a legitimate study of whether or not I suck in other ways.”

 

Despite having started this rodeo, Brad sucks in a startled breath at Nate’s words, and that invites a dirty smirk from Nate, who steps closer to rest the flat of his hand over Brad’s sternum.  Brad can feel the echo of his heartbeat resonating beneath Nate’s warm hand, is suddenly hyper-aware of how loud his breath is in the still room and how his blood is pounding against his eardrums.

  
It’s like a combat rush, except for the way his cock is twitching in his khakis.

 

Past the point of saying no, even if that’s the only sane way to self-preservation, Brad instead reaches up  to curve his gun hand around the nape of Nate’s neck and draw him closer, trapping his hand between them to leverage a kiss from Nate’s mouth, which opens eagerly for Brad’s insistent tongue.

  
One of them moans—or maybe it’s both of them—and Brad feels the telling nudge of Nate’s cock as it hardens against Brad’s thigh.

 

There’s no wall here to shove Nate against, no familiar voices lending energy to the frantic darkness, no possibility of discovery to drive them to finish each other off.

 

There’s also no bed.

 

“Fuck,” Brad groans as Nate pulls away just far enough to undo his belt, button, and zipper and reach into his briefs to wrap his hand around Brad’s cock.

 

Brad traps Nate’s wrist with the hand that isn’t gripping Nate’s shoulder.   He feels the strong bones of Nate’s wrist, feels his muscles contract as he fights Brad’s restriction.

 

When Nate looks up, frustration and confusion on his face, Brad shakes his head.

 

“If we’re doing this, I want to see you.  And I want you to see me.”  
  


“I do see you.  I’ve _always_ seen you.”

 

Nate’s raw expression and the honesty of his words drive another spike of need through Brad and his cock jumps in their twin grip.

 

Nate smirks, raises a truly lewd eyebrow in challenge, but Brad shakes his head again.

 

“I want to see you naked on your hands and knees.”

 

It’s Nate’s turn to suck in a surprised breath.  He makes a little, involuntary sound, and Brad feels his muscles shift again when Nate opens his hand, head nodding raggedly.

 

“Yeah,” he says, voice rough.  “Okay.  But you should know… Nigeria was a clusterfuck.”  He says it like Brad should be able to decode it without a cipher.  Then he makes quick work of his own pants, leaving Brad feeling for a moment bereft of contact before he gets with the program and strips down.

 

When he’s naked, Nate pads to the door and drives home the crude wooden bolt that provides primitive security for the hut.  He crosses to the shredded mattress and tosses a wrinkled light blanket over it.

 

Then he turns on a slow pivot and stands there, six feet away, hands at his sides, cock jutting out from his body, lips already red and swollen from their kissing.

 

Brad doesn’t know what Nate sees when he looks at him, doesn’t know what Nate expects to see.  They hadn’t seen each other naked before; for all that the military offered ample opportunity for group nudity, NCOs and officers rarely shared barracks or heads.  Brad knows he’s got some ugly scars.

 

Of course, none of them compare to Nate’s.

 

Brad has to stop himself from crossing the room and shaking the truth out of Nate, demanding to know how he’d gotten so grievously injured, who’d done it, and where Brad could find them so he could return the favor with interest.

 

He forces himself to go slowly, seeing in Nate’s eyes a kind of uncertainty that makes Brad sick, like Nate thinks Brad might be disgusted by Nate’s body.

 

That’s not what Brad feels at all.  Despite his ardor, despite the ache growing in his balls, Brad is distracted by the evidence of what Nate’s endured, and a part of him—maybe a greater part even than the one that wants to throw Nate onto the bed and mount him like a rutting animal—yearns to spend an hour tracing each angry, puckered puncture mark and travel the silver rivers of ruined skin with his tongue.

 

As if sensing the path of Brad’s thoughts, dangerous in their tenderness, Nate turns away from Brad’s intent gaze and lowers himself to kneel on the bed, giving Brad a filthy look over his shoulder.  “Thought there was something you wanted,” he taunts.

 

But Brad is a champion of deflection, and he recognizes an Olympics-level example of it when he sees it.  If Nate thought his actions would draw Brad’s attention away from what had happened to Nate, he’s obviously mistaken.

 

  
For one thing, Nate’s back has some equally awful scarring, the kind that speaks of sustained and deliberate torture, torture not for information but out of perverse and sadistic pleasure.

 

For another, Brad’s waited too fucking long to rush things now.

 

Instead of engaging eagerly in the ravishment Nate is clearly encouraging, Brad kneels beside Nate on the mattress and rests his spread fingers between Nate’s shoulder blades, right over the worst of the damage to his back.  He keeps it there as Nate’s lewd smirk grows awkward and artificial, as it slips into a weary resignation and then flees altogether, to be replaced by the mask of indifference Brad’s seen before.

 

  
“Don’t,” Brad orders, quiet but firm.  Beneath his palm, Nate’s skin shivers, and he drops his head, leaving the vulnerable knob at the top of his spine open, as if he half invites a killing blow.

 

Instead, Brad sucks a kiss there and then slides his wet lips to the juncture of Nate’s shoulder and neck, where he bites, a tender, insistent pressure that draws a long, “Oh, God,” out of Nate, whose elbows start to quake as his strength at last gives out.

 

Brad pauses to swivel until he’s behind Nate, straddling his thighs, and braces himself with one hand while wrapping the other forearm around Nate’s chest, effectively taking his weight.  His cock settles into the crack of Nate’s ass, and he shifts his hips a little, dragging it.

 

This wrings a sound out of both of them.

 

“Please,” Nate says, but Brad doesn’t think he’s begging to be fucked.  He’s asking instead for Brad to stop being tender, to stop kissing the dead skin of his back, to stop murmuring over the insults and outrages carved into Nate’s flesh by a vicious hand.

 

“I don’t have anything,” Brad admits then.  

 

“I don’t care.”

 

“I do,” Brad urges.  “It’ll hurt.”

 

“I don’t care,” Nate reiterates, a certain stubbornness in his tone making Brad almost smile.

 

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

 

“Maybe I want you to.”

 

Brad pushes away then, letting Nate collapse against the blanket, leaving space between them so that the only place they touch is where Brad’s knees bracket Nate’s thighs.

 

“I’m not going to punish you for hurting me.  It doesn’t work like that.”

 

“Maybe it’s not about _you_.”  There’s something calm and settled about the way Nate says it, something that suggests he owns the words, that he’s comfortable with this confession in a way that he’s not with many other things he’s laid naked before Brad that day.

 

“They really fucked you up,” Brad observes, taking some of the sting of his words away by stroking his hand down Nate’s long back and over the curve of his ass.  The skin there is untouched, which makes Brad almost dizzy with relief.  Of course, just because there aren’t scars, doesn’t mean…

 

“Did they…Were you raped?”

 

Nate’s skin shivers again under Brad’s hand, but he shakes his head, not raising his face from where he’s brought it to rest against his crossed forearms.

 

“No.”

 

“Then what’s this about, Nate?”

 

At last, Nate opens his eyes and cranes his neck around enough to look at Brad.

 

“It’s about wanting to feel your cock inside of me for days after you get back in your truck and leave here.”

 

_Oh._

 

“Where do you keep your gun?”

 

For a lot of other people, that would’ve been a non-sequitur, but Brad knows Nate gets it by the huff of laughter and the nod he gives, indicating the corner to the west of the fireplace.  Brad leaves Nate laughing on the bed and roots around until he locates a heavy plastic sack that contains a small gun-care kit.  With the part of his brain not entirely focused on fucking Nate through his thin mattress, Brad notes Nate’s SAT phone and the spare clips he has for his gun.

 

He returns to Nate’s bed with the familiar little can of lubricant, making a show of flipping back the red top to squeeze precious drops onto his fingers.  Nate’s suddenly not laughing anymore.  

 

Instead, he tenses and pushes himself back onto his hands and knees, but his head is dropped and his muscles relaxed when Brad straddles his thighs again and traces a slick finger down his crack toward the puckered hole.

 

Nate groans as Brad pierces him with the first finger.  Brad echoes with a broken, “Fuck,” the tightness of Nate and the heat making his cock, which had deflated a little at his impromptu scavenger hunt, return to full mast.

 

Brad’s second finger wrestles a grunt from deep in Nate’s chest, and the sound and the feel of Nate clenching around his fingers makes Brad’s cock twitch and leak.

 

“Brad,” Nate offers in warning as Brad starts to work a third finger into him.

 

Brad surrenders to the urgency in Nate’s tone and works the remaining oil on his fingers over his cock before lining up and pushing inside by slow inches, every one winning a grunt of pained pleasure from Nate, who’s shaking now and swearing.

 

When Brad’s seated, the restrictive heat of Nate pulling his pleasure into a hot, tight ball at the base of his spine, he says, “Okay?”  His throat is full of more than just desire, choking the word out of him.  He thinks his heart might burst from the intense rightness of the moment, from the sweaty skin of Nate’s hip under his steadying hand and the little sounds Nate makes as Brad seats himself.

 

“Fuck me,” Nate answers, voice tight with need, and Brad obliges, pulling back only to plunge in hard, setting a merciless, punishing rhythm that drives Nate to his elbows, drops his sweating face into his arms, where he muffles a constant string of curses against his wet skin.

 

Brad works his hips until he strikes a spot that strangles a shout out of Nate’s throat, says, “Touch yourself,” in his drill sergeant voice, and jerks through a ripping orgasm as Nate stutters under him and curses his way through his own.

 

“Think anyone heard us?” Brad jokes as he pulls out of Nate, earning a quiet sound of discomfort from him.  

 

“I think we’ve just strengthened my cover,” Nate answers, only half-joking.  Brad can hear it in his voice, the way Nate is already calculating what comes next.

 

  
It makes him sad and proud simultaneously.  Nate’s not a wet-behind-the-ears lieutenant anymore.  He’s earned his bars and his scars.

 

Brad drops a kiss between Nate’s damp shoulder blades, prompting Nate to turn his face toward Brad where he’s propped up on one elbow facing Nate.

 

“I’d like this to happen again,” Nate says without preamble.  Brad feels a current of fear and anticipation shoot through him.

 

“Me too,” he answers, making it as much of a promise as either of them are ready or willing to hear.

 

“Good,” Nate says, ruining the mood with a jaw-cracking yawn.  

 

Brad chuckles and slaps Nate on the ass, sitting up in preparation for crawling off the ruined mattress to gather his clothes.  It’ll be dark soon along the road, and Brad made a promise to his CO.

 

He thinks Nate’s asleep as he shakes out his boonie and puts it on, but as he shuffles toward the door, Nate calls out, “Be careful on the road.  Don’t get dead.”

 

There’s affection in his tone that warms Brad and brings a flush of embarrassment to his cheeks.  He hopes it’s dim enough in Nate’s house to hide the blush.

 

“You either.”

 

They don’t make plans for the future.  Neither of them is in command of his own fate, nor is Brad free to come and go as he likes.

 

It’s enough to know that they both want the same thing.  

 

As he climbs into his truck, leaving Nate dozing naked on the makeshift bed they’d just christened, he sees Turan lounging in the doorway of Atal’s house, a knowing smile on his face.  The boy sketches a cocky wave at Brad and Brad returns the gesture, confident that the boy, at least, means Nate no harm.

 

He hopes the same can be said of Turan’s grandfather.

 


	2. The Road Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They're together, sure, but there's a hell of a lot trying to tear them apart. Geography is the least of their concerns, though even that plays its part in the end.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please see Chapter One for all header and end notes.

**16 April 2006.  1800 local time.  Ghar Waale.  Bermel District, Paktika Province, Afghanistan.**

 

The dust from Brad’s Jeep has barely settled on the road out when two men appear at the top of the village, nearest the narrow pass to the fields to the north.  They’re carrying AK-47s slung casually at their sides, and by their postures and disdainful expressions they telegraph their feelings about the village and villagers:  There’s no threat here they need worry about.

 

Roshan gathers Laila against him and hustles her away from the village well, disappearing into his uncle’s house, where Nate knows there is a gun.  Roshan’s uncle, Sahar, had fought the Soviets long ago.  Younger than Atal by only a few years, he was a member of the village shura, sort of the town council, and the unofficial defender of Ghar Waale.

 

Sahar was an unlikely warrior for all of his war stories; he was half-blind, lame in one leg, and not averse to sampling the local hashish.

 

As the men walk, the street ahead of them clears of people, until it’s only Nate waiting at his end and the men approaching down the middle of the road, creating a strangely familiar tableau as they come to a halt ten paces from Nate:  Showdown at the Ghar Waale corral.

 

Nate observes his visitors for signs of their identity and intentions.

 

The men have the hawkish features and fair skin of native Pashtun men, which doesn’t necessarily mean they’re Afghani.  The British had divided up tribal peoples with the willful abandon of the deeply ignorant and perpetually arrogant.  Pashtuns from over the Hindu Kush in Pakistan had made the war on their border their business for decades.

 

They’re probably not from Shahzar, however; Nate had seen no Pashtuns in his crew.

 

That likely makes them members of the group that had delivered the night letter, the “bad men” in the hills that Atal—and Brad—had warned Nate about.

 

He spares a wishful thought for his gun, hidden in its usual place in the corner of his hut, beside the gun care kit with its depleted supply of gun oil.  What might’ve been a distracting thought—or an arousing one—under other circumstances serves only to pour a bucket of cold apprehension down Nate’s back.  He has something more to live for now than he had a few hours before, and while it is probably because of Brad’s visit that these men are showing up now, it also isn’t the typical insurgents’ style to barge in by daylight and carry someone off, so he doesn’t know what these armed, unsmiling men want.

 

He finds out soon enough.

 

One of them barks something short and harsh, directed not at Nate, apparently, but at Atal’s door, where Nate notices Turan standing with fear in his eyes but a defiant tilt to his chin.

 

 

The boy trots over to the strangers, and Nate wants to yell at him to go back, to stay away, but he keeps quiet under the sharp, predatory gaze of the other of the two men, whose eyes never leave Nate while his partner speaks in a rapid back and forth with the boy.

 

Turan turns to Nate at last and says, “These men wish to speak with you about medical care for a wounded man.  They say he’s up the mountain, in a cave there.  He is badly wounded and needs your help.”

 

 _Not likely_ , Nate thinks, calculating the odds of his survival should he leave Ghar Waale with these two.  But he cannot refuse medical aid outright; if he’s to maintain his cover and the tenuous security its neutrality provides him, he has to at least make a show of being concerned for the welfare of an injured man.

 

“Tell them that I have better facilities here to treat him.  Tell them I will show them the clinic and they can see for themselves how good it is, what a fine place it is for caring for their friend.”  

 

Nate accompanies the words with a gesture toward the unfinished aid station, wishing now he’d had time to finish hooking up the ceiling fan, even if he does not yet have a generator to turn it.  Sometimes, even simple amenities can delight the hardened men who make the mountains their home and bastion; he’s seen worse men swayed by less impressive things:  clean gauze bandages, instant sutures, over-the-counter painkillers.  Hell, he’d once backed down a Sudanese warlord by offering him six aspirin and a bottle of rubbing alcohol.

 

But these men are having none of Nate’s solicitude.

 

  
“They say you must come,” Turan translates, eyes widening a little with real alarm.  The man who’s been speaking, obviously the alpha dog of the pair, has his hand at the base of Turan’s neck.  It’s clear from the boy’s expression that the man is tightening his hold painfully.

 

“Knock it off,” Nate barks, eyes suddenly cold and hard.  They might not understand his words, but by their expressions, it’s evident that they understand what Nate means.

 

  
With his hand, the man shakes Turan, grinning humorlessly, all bad teeth and worse intentions.  He sneers something ugly and Turan blanches, going limp in the man’s punishing hold.

 

“Go ahead,” Nate says to Turan, voice gentle, eyes only for him.  “Don’t be afraid.  Just tell me what they’ve said.”

 

But Turan will not.  He closes his scarred lips and shakes his head as much as he can, given the restrictions of the man’s hand on his neck.

 

Nate understands then that the words were a threat not against him but against the boy, and by Turan’s paleness, it takes little imagination for Nate to grasp the precise nature of the threat.

 

“Tell them that I cannot leave the village.  It grows dark, and these mountains are full of bad men.  If they want their friend to be treated, they will have to wait until morning, when I can leave without fear of being attacked, or bring him to me now.”

 

He hates to say it to Turan, hates to put the boy in such a terrible position, but to his credit, the boy lives up to the meaning of his name.  He translates without hesitation, his eyes blinking back tears of terror he refuses to let fall, and he doesn’t flinch when the man squeezes his neck again and shakes him in a teeth-rattling fashion.

 

“He says that you will go with them to the cave or you will die where you stand.”

 

Nate nods evenly, eyes narrow, and lets the coldness inside of him seep into the bones of his face, into his eyes and curled lips, into the stillness of his posture and the set of his shoulders.

 

“Tell them that they are wasting the life of their friend, who even now may be dying of his wounds.  Tell them that I will not be responsible for the man’s death, that his blood is on their hands.”  Nate clings to his cover, forcing the men to play the game on his terms, not theirs.  “They can bring him here and I will treat him.  I will clean and tend to his injuries and give him a place to rest and medicine to prevent sickness.  I will feed him good food to make him strong.  These things I can do.  But I cannot go to the mountain with night coming on.”

 

While Nate has spoken, in an even, reasonable tone, he has not changed his expression.  He knows that they know he is not really a doctor; they know that he knows that they do not really have an injured friend. 

 

But Nate also knows that the men cannot have come to kill him like this.  If they believe he’s Nick Frazier, then they want his guns.  If they think he’s only a Western infidel unwisely interfering in Afghani life, then they would better serve their cause by executing him publicly and making of it a lesson and a show.

 

It is an unpleasant standoff, but no one has to die here, and the men seem to realize it.  The man holding Turan thrusts him away with a powerful shove that sends the boy sprawling in the dirt at Nate’s feet.  The other grips his gun and fires into the earth only inches from the boy.  The earth is kicked up in violent geysers, peppering Turan with stinging shrapnel and coating Nate in a fine layer of yellow-grey dust.

 

With a parting sneer, the men turn their backs contemptuously to Nate and the boy and walk back through the village, mugging at the children brave enough to peek out of their doors and mock-threatening their mothers, who appear like sheeted ghosts with covered hands to pull their children into the dubious safety of their huts.

 

When the men have disappeared, Nate helps Turan to his feet but does not attempt to dust him clean, remembering just in time that Turan doesn’t like to be touched.

 

The boy dusts himself off with an impressive degree of dignity and shares a wobbly smile with Nate.  He can see subtle tremors shaking the boy’s limbs, and he feels a crushing sense of guilt at being the cause of his further torment.  Turan’s suffered enough brutality in his short life; Nate hates himself for inviting more.

 

“They will come again to take you, Mister Kochai.  They will come in the dark and drag you away.  This was only for show, to let us know that we cannot harbor you any longer without danger to ourselves.”

 

Nate risks putting a hand on the boy’s slender shoulder, and Turan allows it for the time it takes Nate to answer.

 

“I won’t let it come to that, Turan.  I won’t let you or your people be harmed because of me.”

 

Turan shakes his head.  “I don’t say this thing as a warning, Mister.  I say it so that you know:  We won’t let them take you away.”

 

Nate is not surprised by the vehemence in Turan’s voice, but he is surprised by the sentiment it conveys.  As far as Nate can discern, the people of the village are only rarely active in the events of the world around them; they are passive victims but never aggressors.  He chalks it up, then, to Turan’s special brand of courage, squeezing the boy’s shoulder and saying, “Let me look at that cut.”

 

A fragment of stone must have caught the boy above his left eye, leaving a nasty gouge that needs at the very least to be cleansed.

 

Turan acquiesces with surprisingly little argument, indicating how shaken he truly is despite his courage in the face of the strangers.  Nate is gentle and slow, telegraphing each of his motions as he tends to the boy’s many cuts and fastens butterfly bandages over the worst of the wounds, the one above his eye.

 

Nate considers that Turan’s body is already a roadmap of suffering, and he hates himself a little more for having left his own marks in the abuse the boy’s most recently taken.

 

When he’s done, Turan scurries off with a shy, “Thank you,” and a nod of his head, and Nate watches him until he disappears into Atal’s home.  Then he makes short work of cleaning up the aid station, a little surprised to find his hands shaking as he clears away the bloodied gauze.  He’d tried not to imagine the uses such a space might come to, but he certainly hadn’t considered that Turan would be its very first patient.

 

Dusk is obscuring the lines of the village huts when Nate at last leaves the aid station.  He’s weary and sickened and worried about the boy and the rest of the villagers, distracted by the latest threat their visitors brought, caught up enough in the evening’s events that he forgets what use his own hut had come to until he passes through the door and catches a scent of sex on the air.

 

  
His eyes track immediately to the messy bed, and a pang of longing so fierce pierces him that he has to catch his breath.

 

Nate closes his eyes against it, swallows around the sudden tightness in his throat, and startles audibly when a tentative soft knock at his doorframe spins him around, hand reaching for a gun he does not keep holstered against his ribs.

 

Turan is there, his serious dark eyes taking in Nate’s condition.  He doesn’t come in or say a word, only beckons with a gesture, and Nate follows him out into the grey twilight.

 

Turan points in the direction of the well, and through the growing gloom, Nate can make out several figures there, can hear the murmur of their voices, some raised in anger, others perhaps pleading for reason.

 

Nate guesses he’s not surprised.  It was bound to come to this—a shura gathered to decide Nate’s fate in the village.

 

Nate has deduced that the general policy of the people here has long been to avoid conflict.  Even old Sahar, for all his talk of killing Soviet soldiers, is quick to disappear when the first signs of trouble shadow the doorways of Ghar Waale.

 

Nate also knows that at least some of the people believe that Nate’s presence brings them only sorrow, that nothing good he can offer will balance the evil he will also bring.

 

As he approaches, the figures become clear.  All the men of the village are present:  Atal, Sahar, Kushan; Roshan’s father, Liwal; Wali, the irrigation expert and Ziar, who owns the greatest number of goats; even Janan, who has never once spoken to Nate but only glowered at him and made warding gestures in his direction, even he shows up to the shura.

 

When Nate arrives at the edge of the gathering, the men pause in their chatter.  Some of them give him a dark look; others appear afraid—whether of him or of the danger he’s brought to their midst, or maybe both, he can’t say.  Turan leads him to the east side of the well and stands a pace behind him and to his left.  A glance at the boy shows his excitement, tempered by a sense of moment; this is his first shura, Nate suspects.

 

Atal begins the proceedings with a long testimony that Turan summarizes in brief:  “Grandfather is telling them of why you are here and what you are doing in the village.  He is explaining, too, why the bad men want you.”

 

Nate’s pretty sure there’s more to Atal’s long spiel than what Turan has shared, but he lets it go.  He’s got more to worry about than Atal’s version of Nate’s biography.  He’s supposed to be meeting Shahzar tomorrow at noon in a place more than an hour’s drive from Ghar Waale.  He’s stashed the weapons in a cave 18 klicks from the village, much of that over crappy road; he’ll have to leave at dawn to retrieve the weapons, ensure that he isn’t being followed or watched, and then make it to the testing site in time to scope it out for possible ambush or traps.

 

His plans could be significantly complicated if the villagers decide that he needs to leave tonight.  He could, of course, spend the night at Shkin in that case, but since he’s sure he’s being watched by Shahzar’s men and the men who’d just paid him a visit, Nate doesn’t want to appear cozy with ISAF.  Even an appearance of duplicity will get him killed, weapons deal or no.

 

When he returns his attention to the gathering, all eyes are on him, and Turan is saying, in a tone that indicates he’s repeating himself, “They want to know what you intend to do about the bad men.”

 

Nate searches the boy’s face for some clue as to what answer is expected.  He’s sure they’d like to hear that he’s got a way to appease the insurgents, but the fact is, he’s out of options here.  If the arms deal goes through, he’ll have gained a formidable ally with whose reputation Nate can blanket the village and keep the people safe.  But he can’t very well explain that to the villagers; after all, he’s supposed to be a medical aid worker, not a death-dealing scumbag.

 

Not for the first time, Nate curses the nature of his occupation.  It’s not so much that he hates lying to the villagers—he’s gotten pretty handy at obfuscation and misdirection.  But he likes Turan and respects Atal, and he knows how it will seem to them when they discover, as they inevitably will, how he has abused their trust and hospitality.  He’ll be a man with no honor.  He’ll have disappointed them.

 

Still, he has to lie.  There’s no choice in the matter.  He can imagine quite clearly what Brad would say to that, and he shuts it firmly away as he starts to reel out a response made up of more big words than meaning.  As Turan translates Nate’s bland and empty assurances, a few of the men nod, seeming to accept what he’s saying.  But the majority of them wear stony expressions, unreadable except for the deep suspicion clear in their eyes.

 

Nate continues, promising the people that he intends the village no harm, that he’s an aid worker sent to help them.  That the insurgents are harassing him merely to see what they can get from him.

 

The people of Ghar Waale are used to such extortion:  Soviet, mujahideen, jihadists, insurgents, their own government, and even, on occasion, ISAF itself—all of these have taken their pound of flesh from the people over the years.  They see the sense in Nate’s words and ask the expected follow-up question:

 

“What will you give them to satisfy them so they leave us alone?” Turan asks.

 

“Once we have a clinic and doctors, we can offer medical care, medicines, and treatment of their illnesses and injuries.”

 

Grumbling follows Turan’s translation of Nate’s words.

 

“But that is some time in the future,” Turan says, a troubled look on his face.  “What can you offer them now so that they will leave us in peace?”

 

Nate puts his hands up in the universal gesture of _What can you do?_   “I have limited supplies now.  I can offer them basic medicines, bandages, water purifying tablets.”

 

But Turan doesn’t even have to translate Nate’s words before the men are once again grumbling and glowering at Nate.

 

“What else?” Turan asks without conferring with the men.  He knows as well as Nate does what the problem is.

 

“I haven’t got anything else,” Nate argues, keeping his voice firm, his expression earnest.

 

“You have Mr. Brad.  He comes from the base.  He can bring you things if you ask him.”

 

This from Atal, by way of his grandson, who seems reluctant to translate.

 

Nate’s shaking his head before Turan’s done interpreting.  

 

“No.  Brad’s new to the country, and he doesn’t have the same resources I have.  He’s just a scout, here to get the lay of the land for future work.  He hasn’t got access to equipment or supplies.  He’s only at the base for security reasons and because he hasn’t made friends with the people as I have made friends with you.”

 

Nate gambles on the famed hospitality of the Pashtun people and their desire to always appear gracious in the eyes of strangers.  Though some had always been wary of Nate’s status in their village, all of the men had taken pains to ask after his comfort and see that he did not want for anything that they themselves could offer him.

 

Atal nods somberly and waves a hand at Nate, saying something stern to Turan that requires no translation:  Nate is being dismissed so the shura can decide what to do about him.

 

He invites Turan back to his home for a simple meal, and the boy accepts in a subdued voice.  He will not meet Nate’s eyes.

 

“Turan, no matter what happens here tonight, you know that I will always be your friend.”

 

Nate typically avoids promises; in fact, he’s learned the hard way over his years in the field that such promises more often endanger rather than help the people to whom he makes them.  But he likes Turan, the brave boy who’d already survived so much hardship, and Nate admires his survivor’s spirit.  He hates to think that Turan feels responsible for what the men of the shura decide.

 

“I know, Mr. K,” Turan answers—too quickly.

 

“It’s not your fault if they decide to send me away.”

 

“I know.”

 

“Then what’s the matter?”  Nate asks in careful Pashto, his words more closely meaning, “What troubles you?”

 

“If they send you away,” Turan begins, hesitating for a long moment, hanging in the doorway of Nate’s hut despite having been invited in to sit and eat.  “Can I come with you?”

 

He asks the favor in a rush, his face aflame with embarrassment, eyes fixed firmly to the dirt floor of Nate’s home. 

 

In a country where asking for things is a part of the daily interchange, where children approaching armed men and begging for pencils and surgical masks and candy is common, Turan’s reticence is both strange and understandable: he’s not asking for a handout; he wants another life.

 

Nate should say no.  He should explain to Turan that he hasn’t got the authority to make something like that happen for the boy.  He should tell Turan that he belongs among his people and play on Turan’s loyalty to family.  Atal, after all, will be relying on his oldest grandson.

 

But Nate doesn’t say no.  For a long moment as he prepares the simple meal they’ll share, he says nothing at all, letting the mundane tasks ease the sudden pounding of blood in his ears.  

 

Turan’s request is nothing like that time three years before when Nate had turned Brad away and closed the door on what might have been, but it’s making him feel the same as he had then:  rushes of hot and cold wash over his skin; his breathing and heart rate have sped up, and he can feel sweat prickling on his scalp and under his arms.  

 

It’s ridiculous to have survived war and torture, hunger and hypothermia, all the vicissitudes of his violent life, only to fear a young boy asking him to make a commitment to taking him away from this war-ravaged, impoverished place.

 

How can Nate say no?

 

 _Is it really that simple_ , Nate wonders.  

 

If he’d said yes to Brad all those years ago, if he’d shared his fear and let Brad have a say in a decision that affected them both, would things have worked out better?

 

Even if they’d crashed and burned under the weight of having to hide who they were and what they meant to each other, would the experience itself have been worth the cost?

 

Hadn’t Nate gone to war with the very same sense of the price of the experience being worth it for what he’d gain?

 

The difference, of course, is that in war, Nate had only risked his life.  With Brad he risks his heart.

 

Nate catches a glimpse of the bed, still wrecked after their earlier lovemaking, and realizes he’s already gotten his answer.

 

His mistake has been in letting fear have a say in his choices.  Obviously, fear had kept from him something worth the sweating palms and shaking breaths; fear had built walls where none were needed and made Nate see monsters where there were only ghosts:  The phantom of failure rising out of Nate’s subconscious to taunt him into turning back.

 

Fear makes Nate stupid, a truth that had just recently been revealed to him in an intimate and earth-shaking fashion.

 

Turan deserves better than stupid.

 

Nate’s taken so long to answer that Turan has actually edged his way out of the door.  The scuffle of his bare feet on the dirt draws Nate’s attention.

 

“If I can make it happen, Turan, I’ll take you with me if you want to go.”

 

The boy’s face lights up, his gap-toothed smile beautiful for the truth in it and the clear delight.

 

“But…”  At Nate’s conditional, Turan stills, as if he’s awaiting a blow he cannot dodge.  “You have to talk it over with your grandfather.  He deserves to know what you have planned.”

 

“Of course, I would not go without getting the permission of my papa,” Turan answers at once, sounding scandalized that Nate could ever think Turan had planned anything else.

 

“Now come eat,” Nate says lightly, changing the subject.  Turan curls himself gracefully onto the remains of the pillows that Nate had brought in for the purpose of dining in the manner of Turan’s people, and they share the nuts and raisins, yogurt and flatbread that Nate has at hand.  As a treat, Nate pulls some pre-packaged Jell-o from his rucksack and offers one to Turan.

 

He’d introduced the boy to the dessert in his first days in the village, and it had quickly grown to be the boy’s favorite.

 

He particularly likes lime green, which inevitably reminds Nate of his nephew Stevie, who will eat only the green kind.  Stevie’s only four, but his enthusiasm for the sugary sweet is easily topped by Turan’s awe.  Even now, after the boy has had half a dozen of the little cups, he still holds the treat like it’s precious.

 

Nate tries to imagine Turan let loose in the snack aisle at the Safeway or Trader Joe’s.  He’s a little goofy with the day’s emotional roller coaster; at least, that’s what he tells himself when he startles at Kushan’s ostentatious throat-clearing in the open door.

Turan has lit the lamp, casting the figure in his door into shadow, but he recognizes Kushan’s posture and the way he tilts his head in deference to Nate as he waits to be acknowledged.

 

“Can I offer you some tea?” Nate asks, following the ritual.  

 

“No, sir.  Please, will you come?”  Kushan speaks the words slowly in his own language, and Nate understands them without Turan’s translation.

 

He wouldn’t have needed it anyway.  The fact that Kushan has appeared in the darkness—in violation of the customs of Afghanis, who feel it’s rude to intrude on someone after dark—and Turan’s reaction to Kushan’s intrusion—stiff-shouldered and blank-faced—tells Nate all he needs to know.

 

He rises with less ease than Turan, who’s already clearing up the dishes, despite Nate’s insistence that he will do it later.  It’s as though the boy doesn’t want Nate to leave a mess, in case he never returns to the little house.

 

Shaking off a frisson of anxiety that the thought brings, Nate gestures for Turan to precede him, and he follows Kushan and the boy, a solemn little parade, through the tiny village to the well, where the shura is visible only by virtue of a fire that someone has lit in a ring of stones on the west side of the well.

 

He tries to discern from the faces of the men what their decision will be.  Kushan will not look at him, nor will Zahar.  That doesn’t bode well.  But when he searches Janan’s face, expecting triumph, he sees only anger, which could mean anything.

 

Nate waits, ignoring the nervous flip in his stomach and the way Turan sidles closer to him, as if his presence could shield Nate from bad news—or as if to insure that if it _is_ bad news, Nate won’t forget his promise to take Turan with him when he leaves Ghar Waale.

 

Atal begins with what is clearly a formula, judging from the formal way that Turan intones the translation, mimicking his grandfather’s cadence.  Nate suspects it’s something from the Koran about hospitality.

 

He looks directly at Nate when he speaks, clearly meaning the words for him and not for the benefit of their audience, who listen without a sound to indicate their feelings about what the village elder is saying.

 

Atal’s tone warms a few minutes in, beginning with the words, “My grandson admires and respects you, and Kushan speaks of the way you have worked in the fields and helping the men with the water system.  Sahar says that he believes you are a brave man much respected among your own people.  I myself have witnessed your influence over the man who was here today, Sahib Brad, who, like you, wishes to help our people.  And you have already begun to tend to our sick and care for those who cannot care for themselves.  You are truly a good and honorable man, Sahib Kochai.

 

All of this speaks in your favor.

 

But you have also brought bad men to our village.  Many here,” And Nate doesn’t think he’s imagining a slightly disdainful curl to Atal’s lip when he says the words, “Prefer peace and quiet and do not want interference from strangers who carry guns and bring evil with them.  Others,” Atal raises his voice at the words, as if lending them greater weight, “Do not believe in returning hospitality with rudeness.”  

 

Turan works hard to translate his grandfather’s speech, and Nate sees the boy struggling over words he has never before had to interpret.

 

 

“Also, we do not think we should be afraid of bad men who come into our village.  It is they who are wrong-doers, not us.”

 

There is a murmur, the first from the gathered men, but Nate cannot tell if they favor or oppose Atal’s words.

 

“Too, we have a responsibility to protect the women and children.”

 

A second murmur, this time of general approval.

 

“But even so, we do not want to raise our boys to be cowards and poor hosts.”

 

Nate marvels, not for the first time, at how the illiterate people of Ghar Waale, living centuries behind the majority of Americans, can grasp the complexities of inter-cultural exchange without a four-hundred page policy manual and weeks of wrangling over minutia.

 

“All of these things a wise people must consider.  But how wise would we be to ignore the words of Allah and the traditions of our ancestors, which say, ‘Take in the stranger, comfort and clothe him’?  And how often will we yield to bad men with evil purposes?  So…”

 

Nate isn’t imagining the dramatic pause.  Atal’s eyebrow quirks upward even as the corner of his lip echoes the motion.  He’s playing to a crowd of one—or, perhaps, two, as Nate considers the tense boy standing beside him.

 

“We have decided that you will remain among us as a member of our village.  You are as a brother to us, and we will not turn our backs on that duty.  We ask only that you do not incite violence here and that you do what you can to prevent the bad men from visiting it upon us.”

 

“I will do whatever is in my power to keep the wolves away,” Nate promises, paraphrasing a popular folk saying applied to a wide variety of domestic and state evils.  “And I thank you for your generosity in opening the doors of your homes to me and for letting me be a part of your community.”

 

It’s a little stilted—Nate hasn’t had to speechify in a good long while, not since he said farewell to his platoon at his paddle party—but it seems to answer the purpose.  Atal breaks the tension by kissing Nate’s cheek, and then one by one the men of the village are echoing their elder’s actions, though some are clearly more reluctant than others.

 

“We will celebrate!” Atal declares, a sentiment that needs no translating.  Resigning himself to a long night of drinking, smoking, and tall tales, Nate joins Turan, who has been made an honorary grown-up for the festivities.  Turan wears a proud, shy smile, and Nate can tell that the boy has to work at speaking slowly and thoughtfully rather than bursting out with the excitement and joy he clearly feels.

 

Considering the events of the day in a lull in the festivities later that night, Nate wonders what the next day has in store.  Certainly, it won’t offer as much pleasure, but perhaps, he thinks, a bolt of anxious excitement racing up his spine, perhaps it will mean a significant step toward completing his mission.

 

_And getting on with the rest of my life._

 

A thought that may have terrified him that same morning now only incites further excitement, and for a moment or two Nate thinks he knows how Turan feels.  There’s a promise in the way he and Brad left things.  For the first time in a long time, Nate is looking past the immediate mission to a life greater than the one he’s had.

 

He just has to survive tomorrow.

 

**17 April 2006.  0600 local time.  Firebase Shkin.  Bermel District, Paktika Province, Afghanistan.**

 

Brad’s had a shitty night when he stalks out of his plywood room and toward the operations center, where he hopes to get orders to patrol with his new CTPT team-in-training.  It’s the kind of day when he wants to shoot at someone, preferably the enemy, since shooting at friendlies comes with a shitload of paperwork and explanations.

 

They’d taken rocket fire—inaccurate, but pounding—for four hours last night.  The first strike had shaken his flimsy walls, vibrated up through the ground and into the frame of his bed.  He’s used to rocket fire, though, used to poorly aimed missiles of death bursting apart outside the walls of the firebase.  He’d taught himself a long time ago to sleep through that shit.

 

But while the enemy was typically content to lob a few at them and then go about their shady business, last night the Taliban had had other things in mind, judging from the relentless pattern of irregular rocket fire that had kept Brad from getting back to sleep.

 

An hour into the barrage, he’d wandered over to one of the lookouts, posted in free-standing towers just inside the Hesco walls, and asked the guy on duty what was going on.

 

“Fuck all if I know, sir,” the guy had groused, turning his night-vision goggles on Brad and shrugging.  “We can see where the rockets are being fired from.  We just haven’t got any orders to return fire.”

 

“I’ll see what I can find out,” Brad had promised, despite a sinking feeling in his stomach that told him he already knew the answer.

 

Politicians back home had been taking shit from the American people for civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Commanders in-country had been trying to explain the situation:  Insurgents used women and children as shields, built their mortar and rocket bases next to schools and in the heart of villages.   But everyone knew that suits back home didn’t care about the actual conditions in Afghanistan.  They just didn’t want to be unpopular on the six o’clock news. 

 

Complicating the matter was FB Shkin’s location, situated close enough to the Pakistan border that it was possible for enemy troops to fire on them from Pakistan.

 

Of course, Pakistan’s President Musharraf swore up and down that there was no way he’d ever let the bad guys into Pakistan; he assured ISAF that he and his military were doing everything in their power to prevent the Taliban from using the Hindu Kush as a hideout-cum-training-camp.

 

Everyone on Brad’s side of the mountains shared a collective eyeroll every time Musharraf made the ridiculous claim; the rat lines from Pakistan were busier than a Bangkok whorehouse when the fleet was in.

 

But as far as the American government and NATO combined forces were concerned, Pakistan was off-limits, at least officially.

 

Which meant, “We can’t return fire,” Captain Taylor explained impatiently, running a hand through his hair and across his face.  He looked like he hadn’t gone to bed at all.

 

“Yessir,” Brad answered, lingering in the operations center only long enough to determine that there had been no injuries to anyone on the firebase nor had there been any damage.

 

“They’re all wide right,” one of the communications guys joked.  

 

“Guess we have to hope they don’t get more accurate than the ’91 Bills’ special teams,” Brad responds, acknowledging the lame sports reference.  

 

He’d wandered back outside, where he reported his findings to the guy on the wall, who snorted cynically and returned to his job of watching helplessly as their enemy lobbed rockets at them.

 

Fractured sleep and grim considerations about military policy in Afghanistan had served to diffuse the mellow afterglow of really good sex, replacing it with a vague but persistent anxiety that nothing good could last long in a place like Afghanistan.

 

Now, in the dawn gloaming, sandy-eyed and haggard, Brad glowers at the bloody sunrise and makes his way back to the ops center, where Taylor, his wrinkled uniform and grey face testament to the fact that he didn’t get to bed at all last night, tells him he and his team will take a patrol at 0700.

 

“Get some coffee,” Taylor advises, and Brad offers to bring some back for the captain.

  
“No, I’m good.”  He’s far from good, but he nods in the direction of two empty Red Bull cans and Brad gets the picture.

 

“Sir,” Brad answers by way of parting.

 

  
“Hey.”  Taylor’s voice stops Brad at the door.  “What’d you find out about the situation in Ghar Waale?”

 

Brad closes the distance between them and chooses his words with care.  “Fick got a night letter from the bad guys.”

 

“TB?”

 

Brad shrugs.  “Who can tell these days?”  Every Tom, Dick, and Harry with a grudge against the West or a desire to make bank on the chaos has thrown his turban into the ring in Afghanistan.  “Just bad guys.”

 

“Anything out of the ordinary about the threats?”

 

“Just the usual, ‘Die Western infidel,’ et cetera.”

 

“So he’s not worried?”

 

Brad takes a moment to consider his answer.  “He’s aware of the dangers, sir.”

 

“Is he prepared for them?”  
  


“He’s a whole lot of alone out there, but he’s got a weapon, if that’s what you’re asking.  And a SAT phone.”

 

Taylor nods absently, eyes tracking back to the map of the Hindu Kush he’d been staring at when Brad came in.

 

“But you already knew that,” Brad guesses, and by the way his captain waggles his head, Brad knows he’s right.  

 

“Let’s just say that there are things _I_ need to know.”

 

Brad really, really hates spy shit.

 

“Yessir,” he answers, putting some steel into his voice.

 

“He’s a grown-up,” Taylor answers shortly, responding to Brad’s tone.  “Ex-Recon.  And an experienced operative.”

 

Brad remembers Nate’s scars, evidence of said experience.  He clamps down on the feelings the memory stirs in him and focuses instead on keeping an impassive face.

 

Taylor must see something there, though, because he narrows his eyes and looks harder at Brad, blowing out a breath after an uncomfortably long moment and shaking his head.

 

“Jesus, what is it about the guy?”

 

“Sir?”

 

“I’ve worked with Fick before.”  It’s out of Taylor’s mouth before the captain has time to think about it, which is apparent by his suddenly stricken expression.  “Forget I said anything,” he mutters, turning back to the map.

 

But that’s not a thing Brad’s likely to forget.  “What happened the last time you worked with Fick?”  He catches himself just before he says, ‘Nate,’ remembering that they’re supposed to be old war buddies.  Old war buddies call each other by their last names; they don’t say ‘Nate’ like a girl who lost her cherry on prom night.

 

Internally, Brad’s shaking his head at himself.  Externally, he’s zeroing in on Taylor’s weary face, which is telegraphing more than the captain intends, if Brad’s any judge, and he has a master’s in reading tired faces, a degree he earned under the challenging tutelage of the person they’re discussing.

 

Taylor’s eyes track up to Brad’s, self-disgust and something else—something that makes Brad distinctly uneasy—clear in his direct gaze.

 

“Look, I’m not the guy’s handler.”  Taylor drops his voice on the last word to a low whisper.  Eight feet away, one of the communications guys gets up and heads for the door, tapping his buddy on the shoulder as he passes him.

 

That guy, too, disappears.

 

So it’s going to be one of _those_ conversations. 

 

Taylor leans back in his chair and laces his hands behind his head, surrendering to exhaustion or maybe simply sick of keeping up the front.  He looks Brad up and down and with a sidewise look at a chair indicates that Brad might want to sit down for this.

 

Brad stays on his feet.

 

“I met Fick early in ’05.  I was on special assignment.  You don’t need to know the where.”

 

“I didn’t know you worked in intelligence, Captain.”

 

Taylor waves off Brad’s comment.  “Briefly.  Wasn’t my thing.  I prefer knowing exactly who I’m working with.”

 

 _That’s an ominous lead-in_ , Brad thinks.

 

“Fick was working on an arms deal with some Islamist extremists.  It was a tricky situation; there was a splinter cell gaining influence in the region, and they wanted guns and bomb components—as many and as much as they could get.  As it was, with what they had they were bringing hell to the place.  They blew up a police station, killed thirty-four, took out a couple of regular army checkpoints, killed another forty-one.  They were being funded by an outside organization that Fick was sure had ties to al-Qaeda.”

 

“That’s a fair bet,” Brad observes dryly.

 

Taylor snorts by way of confirmation.

 

“His job was to provide weapons to the splinter group as an excuse to meet their money man, try to trace that guy back to his organization.  Make the connections clear.”

 

“But…”  

 

“He was working with this Uzbek, Hamza—real scumbag, fingers in the child prostitution pie, human trafficking, everything.  Guns were just a side job for him.  He was using the opportunity the gun trade provided to pull kids from the villages this extremist group was attacking and sell those kids on the underground sex slave market.  Anyway, this Hamza loved Fick, couldn’t get enough of him.  Thought the sun rose and set on Fick’s ass.  Honestly, it was disgusting.”

 

Brad isn’t sure what kind of reaction his captain is expecting out of him, but Taylor’s tone leaves no room for doubt about his meaning.  He’s implying that Nate was fucking Hamza.  And he seems to be suggesting that that fact should bother Brad.

 

What Brad can’t figure is why Taylor is pushing this particular button.  Is he waiting for a typical homophobic Marine response?  Does he want Brad to joke about Nate’s sweet ass, maybe speculate on Nate’s relationship with the local Pashtun men, who have a reputation for enjoying the love that dare not speak its name?

 

Or is Taylor a little more perspicacious than that, suspecting that Brad’s relationship with Nate is more than just war buddies who look out for each other?

 

“And what capacity were you serving in at this time, Captain?” Brad asks.  He’s learned that the best way to avoid committing to an answer is to ask another question.

 

Taylor shakes his head.  “Doesn’t matter.”

 

“It does if I wanted to, say, verify your information.”  

 

Taylor spears Brad with a sharp look.  “You calling me a liar, Colbert?”

 

“No, sir.  I’m suggesting that, depending on your capacity, you may not have had access to all the intel.”

 

Taylor’s smirk is ugly.  “I didn’t have to watch Fick take it up the ass to know that it was happening, Sergeant.”

 

“Still, sir, seems like you’re awfully preoccupied with Fick’s sex life.  That level of _intimacy_ suggests you had to be his handler or something like it.”

 

It’s obvious from Taylor’s change in posture—he sits up, lays his hands flat on the map in front of him, pushes himself to stand, gets right up in Brad’s personal space—that he’s recognized Brad’s challenge for what it is.

 

“What I did or didn’t do in Nigeria is none of your fucking business, Colbert.”  Taylor’s voice has risen.  His bloodshot eyes widen as he realizes his slip-up at the same moment that Brad’s breath freezes in his throat.

 

“I’d say that you’d do well to apply that advice in Nate Fick’s case, too, sir,” is all Brad says in response, giving his captain a minute to gather himself.

 

Some of the bravado goes out of Taylor’s posture.  His hand shakes, minute tremors, as he passes it over his eyes.  

 

“You’re tired, sir,” Brad says, giving the man an out.  As much as he wants to know what the fuck happened in Nigeria, he knows better than to push Taylor when he’s in this state.  He’s not worried about his CO taking a poke at him; he just isn’t the kind of man to take advantage of another’s weakness, not like this.

 

He’d make a lousy spy, he guesses.

 

“I’m tired of a lot of things, Colbert,” Taylor answers.  He pauses, choosing his next words with care.  

 

“Look, Nate Fick is bad news.  Regardless of what you think of his personal life, his professional life is a clusterfuck.  There’s nothing he touches that doesn’t go to shit, one way or another.  If I had my way, he’d be nowhere near my fucking base.  As it is, I _have_ to work with him.  But you have a choice, Brad.  I know you were friends with the guy back in Iraq.  But that guy?  He’s not this guy.  I don’t know what Fick was like when you were friends, but I’m telling you, the Nate Fick I know would do whatever it takes—give away anything, take apart anyone—to achieve his mission.”

 

Brad wants to ask about Nate’s scars, wants to demand an answer from Taylor about how someone he characterizes as so self-serving could end up in a situation where he’d be tortured like Nate was.  Who’d he ‘take apart’ to earn that?

 

“What happened to Hamza, sir?” Brad asks in a strangled voice he barely recognizes as his own.

 

“Hamza died.  The guys Fick was dealing with cut him up for days and tied what was left of him across the hood of Fick’s truck.”

 

“Sounds like poetic justice,” Brad notes.

 

“I’m not saying I cried for the guy.  He got what he deserved.”  

 

“And Fick?”

 

Taylor shrugs.  “You ask me, they gutted the wrong asshole.”

 

Brad nods tightly and tries to keep his hands from clenching.  “Yessir, Captain.”  He resorts to formality, puts the rank between them.  He needs the distance, or he’s afraid he might beat Taylor unconscious.

 

“Get out of here, Colbert.  Grab that coffee.  You’re on patrol in fifteen mikes.”

 

“Yessir,” Brad repeats, grateful for the few minutes of solitude he’ll have before he has to gather the team and load up their Humvee.

 

As he sips his bitter coffee and chases eggs around his plate, Brad wonders why Nate didn’t tell him he’d met Captain Taylor before.  Seems like the sort of detail Nate would share, even if it did come under the ubiquitous “need to know” heading.  

 

He tries hard not to think about the purported relationship between Nate and Hamza.  Taylor could be full of shit.  Even if Taylor isn’t the sort of Marine who countenances scuttlebutt—in fact, he’d made it clear he preferred his men to avoid gossip, favoring hard facts instead of rumor in all cases—he might’ve been making suppositions where there was no solid evidence.

 

Or maybe Nate had had to play Hamza like that.  Doesn’t mean they were fucking.

 

And even if they were, it’s not like Brad had been a monk himself in the years since Nate’s paddle party.

 

_Jesus, you’re pathetic.  You’re jealous over a guy who may or may not have been fucking Nate a year and a half ago but who is most definitely dead now._

 

He absolutely doesn’t think about the fact that Nate could be using him for some as-yet-unrevealed, spookish purpose.

 

He knows Nate.

 

 _You knew Nate_.  Brad’s internal voice is hard and insistent, familiar in its doubt.

 

No.  He fucking _knows_ Nate, knows the Nate that stood before him uncertain and naked, who moaned Brad’s name as Brad skated his tongue over each and every one of those hard-earned scars, signifiers of what Nate would give up for his cause.  Knows the Nate who promised with his lips and hands and most private places, if not with words themselves, that they had a future together.

 

The insidious voice reminds Brad that he knows, too, the Nate who left him in a hallway with only the promise _This can’t happen again_.

 

Fuck it.  Brad’s not going down that road.

 

  
 _This_ **did** happen again.  Happened in glorious Technicolor with a soundtrack worthy of the best porn on the internet.

 

 

Fuck Taylor and the CIA and Islamist extremists and the whole fucking continent of Africa, for that matter.

 

Brad would stand with him if it was Nate fucking Fick against ISAF, the ANA, the Taliban, and al-Qaeda.  He’d stand with Nate against the whole goddamned world.

 

Since Nate hasn’t asked him to, however, Brad settles for tossing the dregs of his coffee in the trash, heading outside to marshal his team, and doing something he can do for Nate:  Patrol the road to Ghar Waale.

 

Ignoring a telling itch between his shoulder blades, Brad takes the wheel of his Humvee, Darab rides shotgun, and Samsoon mans the gun up top.  The other two guys, whose names, Brad has learned, are Arman and Nang, watch their sectors from the back seat, eyes sharp and hard in the clear morning light.

 

It’s not the usual province of CTPTs to run routine, visible patrols; they’re the CIA’s super-secret, quiet and deadly forces in these mountains.  But this particular team is still in training, and there’s work to be done that needs doing.

 

“It’s going to be a good day,” Brad says, knowing the Afghans will understand the way he says the words if not the words themselves.  He hopes that if he says it like he means it, it’ll come true regardless of the itch.

 

*****

 

Forty klicks away, Nate’s having a bad day.  His POS truck is stuck in a ragged hole in the dead-end road that leads from his secreted weapons cache to a secondary artery that in turn meets the goat road to Ghar Waale.  He’d left the village just as first light was wiping the stars from the sky and made decent time to the cave, loaded the weapons onto his truck with some effort, and then pulled out with plenty of time to make it to the meeting with Shahzar.  

 

The hole—old Soviet mine damage, he suspects—can’t be gone around, the walls of the mountains hugging the road in a perfect “ambush alley,” but he’d gotten through it twice before, once taking this load in and then driving back out.  Maybe the way the load has shifted, or maybe a change in tire pressure—hell, maybe karma or the devil’s luck or some incalculable series of factors—whatever the case, he’s stuck.

 

There’s nothing for it but to unload, push himself out, and reload.

 

Nate feels time slipping away from him as he shoulders the last of the M203 crates off the tailgate and into the dirt.  He ignores the itch between his shoulder blades that suggests that he’s in danger, chalks it up to anxiety at running late for the meet.

 

Sitting higher on its abused suspension, the Hilux clears the crater with an unhappy whine of its engine, and then Nate goes about the tedious process of reloading the weapons.

 

He’s securing the camo tarp over the load when the first shot zings out of the ravine overhead and ricochets off the rocks to his right.  He ducks, feeling the sting of rock shrapnel against his exposed forearms, and scrambles over the tailgate to drop to the earth.  He crawls on his elbows and toes to the driver’s side door, which he’d left open for just such an occasion.

 

He pulls his gun from where he’d left it, between the doorframe and footwell, and waits out a second shot, this one caroming off the tailgate and digging a furrow in the roof of the truck before raising a mini-dust-devil where it strikes the road.

 

The sniper, with a Lee Enfield rifle making its distinct, precise racket, is positioned on the ravine at Nate’s back, right where he can put one through the rear window of his truck and into Nate’s neck as he drives away.  

  
Grateful for the secondhand Kevlar helmet and the body armor he’d donned this morning, Nate considers his options.  The angle of the shots are such that the sniper won’t have a clear target until Nate’s driven a couple of hundred yards toward the secondary road.  If the shooter had been more patient, he could’ve drilled Nate in the neck or shot out the tires on the truck before Nate knew the guy was there.

 

Someone jumped the gun.  Literally.

 

Nate slithers into the truck cab, not bothering to close the door, and keeps low, eyes just above the line of the dash, so he can make out the road ahead.  He has to hope that the sniper’s buddies didn’t plant an IED while Nate was back at the cave.  He can’t watch the road and avoid sniper-fire at the same time.  

 

Shit, it’s back to luck, which Nate rarely has in his favor these days.

 

It’s not like in the movies, where the hero guns the engine and the getaway car squeals its way to safety. The mine crater he’d just freed himself from isn’t the only barrier to smooth driving; the hard earth is pock-marked with similar holes and broken by jutting rocks that can puncture a tire as sure as a sniper’s bullet.  The turns are narrow and sharp and can only be taken at a creeping roll.

 

If the sniper isn’t alone, if there are others up on the ridge with precision weapons and the skill to use them, Nate’s not making it out of the ambush alive.

 

As he rolls toward the first obscuring turn, a round impacts the back of the truck, and Nate wonders if they’ve got armor-piercing bullets up there.  If they do, he’s not going to have to worry about an IED blowing him up—his own load will do the job for them.

 

He’d packed the mines, grenades, and C-4 on the interior, boxing them in with crates of guns just in case he came under fire.  It’d be a hell of a good shot—or a complete accident—that could light him up like a Roman candle.  

 

Since fortune seems to favor someone else these days, Nate’s not feeling real secure.  He manages the first turn without driving the truck’s nose into the ravine wall and is working his way through the second turn when a deeper percussion signals an RPG launch.  He holds his breath, steeled for impact, and lets loose a shaky sigh when he sees the dust-cloud of grenade impact on the ridgeline thirty yards in front and twenty yards above his current location.

Nate risks a little more speed as he comes to the last straightaway before the final turn.  Here, the earth in front of his truck is zippered with gunfire, and he hears the throaty, staccato drumming of AK-47s, three or four by the sounds of them.

 

As he reaches the final turn, a ninety-degree elbow that requires him to slow almost to a stop, a lucky ricochet burrows its way through the rear window and grinds into the dash, obliterating the radio and scattering glass and plastic across the seat and down the collar of his tee-shirt.

 

He smiles and gives a shaky hoot of laughter, pounding the steering wheel with one hand and suddenly missing Gunny Wynn, who’d have shared a lop-sided smirk with him at the near-miss.

 

Once free of the tortuous bend, he’s got twenty yards before he makes the hard left turn onto the secondary road that will take him back to the main road to Ghar Waale.  The Hilux bounces onto the slightly smoother road as wild gunfire rakes the driver’s side rear quarter panel.  The truck bucks a little, and he holds his breath, fearing that they’d gotten a tire, but then he’s ahead of the gunfire and able to pick up speed, thirty miles per hour feeling like a NASCAR race relative to his earlier crawl.

 

Moving steadily away from the bad guys, Nate spares a thought for how they’d known where to find him.  He figures it’s the same group whose representatives he’d met the night before; while it’s likely that there are many different insurgent cells making their home in the inhospitable terrain of Paktika Province, it’s unlikely to have been coincidence that one of those unknown groups just stumbled across his stash site.

 

Had they actually known where he’d hidden the weapons, they’d have taken them before Nate had gotten there and then set up an ambush.  

 

No, this had the feel of a planned operation.  They’d followed him somehow, set up on the road he’d have to take out, figuring to take the weapons after they’d killed him since they hadn’t been able to find the cache before he got to it.

 

There’s a disturbing level of insider knowledge involved in Nate’s supposition, meaning that the bad guys had to have access to some intel.

  
Since Nate hadn’t told anyone—not Taylor, not his handler, not even Brad—where he’d hidden the weapons, the only conclusion that makes sense is that there’s a tracker on his truck.

 

“Fuck!” Nate grates out, pulling over to the edge of the road and starting a systematic search of the interior.  He doesn’t have time for this shit; as it is, the delay is going to make him late, which will piss Shahzar off and give the insurgent the advantage in further negotiations.  

 

But that’s less of an inconvenience than, say, his deal being scuttled by some overzealous Special Forces team trying to take down Shahzar and his men.

 

The search doesn’t take long, however, because this time luck’s on Nate’s side.  As he paws through the splayed wiring and shattered components of his radio, he finds a little piece of black plastic with a green light that winks happily at him.  

 

He drops it out the open truck window and steps out into the road, taking care to straddle the tracker where it lays in the dirt blinking insidiously at him.  The tracker makes barely a sound as he crushes it under his boot heel before resuming his position behind the wheel and pulling back out onto the road.

 

Mind only half on the road, dangerously distracted but unable to help himself, Nate turns over the possibilities in his head.  Who’d planted the fucking tracker?

 

No way Jake had put it there.  Sure, the Aussie’s a sociopathic scumbag, but he’s a self-serving sociopathic scumbag.  It wouldn’t profit him to scuttle Nate’s deal.  Jake doesn’t deal directly with terrorists, for one thing, preferring to keep his hands clean, at least on that count.  And if Jake had been going to double-cross Nate and take back the weapons, he’d have been better served to wait for Nate to pick up the full order, not just the weapons for the test.  Nate would’ve delivered all the cash at that point, giving Jake a huge windfall.

 

So if not Jake, it had to be a different kind of scumbag.  The more official, American kind.

 

Nate feels a cold stillness settle over him, weighing down his spine and seeping into his extremities as he realizes it had to be his own people who’d marked the guns.

 

It might’ve been Taylor, he thinks.  The guy had never liked Nate, and he’d made it clear he didn’t appreciate the possibility that the guns Nate was dealing might end up dealing death out to Taylor’s own guys.

 

But while it makes sense that Taylor might want to track the weapons, it doesn’t make any sense that he’d give that information to the bad guys, which would defeat any reason Taylor might have for tracking the guns in the first place.

 

So it had to be someone else, someone higher up the spook food chain.  Someone like his handler, or a shadow agent working for his handler.

 

And that means that Nate is a pawn in someone else’s game, that there’s an unknown agenda that involves sacrificing Nate’s mission—and Nate himself, it seems—for the greater good.

  
He doesn’t know what the greater good might be, but he does know he’s not going to make it easy for the assholes.

 

Back on the Ghar Waale road, Nate checks his watch, cursing to realize he’s almost an hour behind schedule.  Pushing his ancient truck to an unsafe speed, he diagnoses the whine in her engine and listens for the telltale grinding that would harbinger a busted frame.  He can’t afford to slow down, but if he fucks up his truck, he’ll miss the meet anyway.

 

Letting out a loud, frustrated breath, Nate eases off the gas and hopes the road is clear from here to the turn-off for the meeting site, an ancillary mountain track that stitches its way up and around Mt. Balu in a series of punishing switchbacks to end at a cleared plateau about forty yards in circumference, where he’d agreed to meet Shahzar and his men for a weapons test.

 

The ancient remains of mud-brick walls and the eagle’s-eye view of the valley to the west of Ghar Waale, a valley threaded by the wide silver ribbon of the Rowd-e Lurah River, indicates that it had once been a military outpost, probably British, maybe even Alexandrine.  Now, it’s a waste of scattered rocks and fallen walls.  

 

Human feces in the sheltered corners and blackened fire rings had indicated that it was still in use by military men, men who had more in common, perhaps, with those ancient warriors of Alexander’s than with Nate himself, who often felt out of step with the culture and people of this part of the world.

 

 

Nate had scouted the site in his second week at Ghar Waale, filing its features away in his memory for just such an eventuality, but he’s only been on the mountain track twice, once up and then once again back down.  All he remembers are dizzying drop-offs, the road barely the width of his truck’s axle.

 

No way Shahzar’s dualie was getting up that road.

 

Small blessings, Nate thinks as he makes the turn onto the mountain track and eases the Hilux into a lower gear.

 

The transmission groans in protest, but eventually it catches and he starts the slow, slow climb to the meeting site.

 

*****

 

Darab spots the insurgent first, his experienced eyes catching sight of a shadow too dark to be natural that resolves itself into the exposed crown of a turban.  The bad guy’s olive-clad arm is barely visible over the edge of the boulder behind which he’s hiding; the round O of his rifle mouth is just another feature of the landscape.

 

“He waits,” Samsoon translates unnecessarily.  Brad knows what the guy is up there for; the road to Ghar Waale narrows and drops into a seasonal creekbed here, the wadi wet only part of the year.  It’s a popular place for IEDs because there’s no other track for drivers to follow; the Humvee either rolls in the ruts made by generations of vehicles, or it doesn’t go down into the wadi.

 

“Spot anything?” Brad asks Samsoon, who’s in the best position to detect a concealed explosive in the road ahead of them.  In the meantime, Brad’s slowed the Victor to a crawl, an action the bad guys are no doubt counting on.  If an IED doesn’t get them, the guys on the ridgeline have a luxury of time in which to aim and fire.  

 

Brad has to stop himself from holding his breath as he waits for the telltale sound of an incoming RPG.

 

“Wait!” Samsoon calls, urgent but low, as he slithers down from the machine gun turret.  “Ahead, three meters.  Bomb.”

 

Brad clenches his jaw and stops the Humvee.  He has to give it to the bad guys; it’s a great place for a trap.  They’ve entered a cattle chute of high rock walls, the steepness of which prevents their big gun from coming into play; the angle’s too sharp.

 

They’ve also just completed a thirty-five degree turn, dicey to reverse out of.

 

As if thinking about it has brought their situation to a head, a sniper round slaps against the armor plating on the hood and a second wings off Brad’s side mirror with a whine.

 

“Can we straddle it?” he asks Samsoon, voice even despite the way adrenaline is spiking his veins with electrified needles.

 

“No,” Samsoon shakes his head.  “Too close to your tires.”

 

Brad can’t actually see out of the back of the Humvee; where the rearview mirror might’ve been had he been tooling down the PCH he’s got a GPS unit hooked to the force tracker.  Where a rear window might’ve come in handy while parallel parking in San Fran, there’s the armor-plated hatch that covers their jerrycans, water, ammunition, field kits, and all the other shit they need to stay viable on patrol.

 

He’s going to need Samsoon in the turret.

 

“Samsoon, you’re going to have to guide me back up out of here.”

 

Beside him, Brad can feel Darab’s eyes regarding him.  He has, after all, just asked the man’s son to make himself a target.  As it is, gunners are the most likely to be hit during a firefight; disable the gunner or the gun, and the Humvee is no longer a serious threat—more like a tougher-than-average cracker box the bad guys just need to pierce.

 

Even as Samsoon nods earnestly and prepares to follow Brad’s order, the rate of fire around them increases.  Bullets thwack into the windshield; the bullet-proof glass spiderwebs but holds.  Behind him, Arman and Nang open fire, though there’s no way they can see who they’re shooting at.  Brad’s tempted to order them to hold fire and not bother wasting ammunition, but Darab beats him to it, sharp words that still their firing.

 

As Samsoon contorts himself back through the turret, an RPG smashes into the dirt six meters behind them.  Debris thuds off the rear hatch and Samsoon ducks back down, face covered in dust, his grinning teeth white against the filth.

 

“I will help,” he promises, standing back up in the turret.  Brad imagines the kid peeking over the cupola, blinking crap from his eyes.

 

A slap on the roof tells Brad to start backing up.  

 

“Kin!  Kin!”  Samsoon shouts over the whine of bullets richocheting off the ravine wall.  In his excitement, he’s reverted to Dari, but “right” and “left” are basic words Brad mastered long ago.

 

Brad feels a pinching sting in his hand and looks down to see a splinter embedded between his first and second fingers.  Ignoring it, he cants the wheel left, as directed.

 

“She,” Samsoon orders seconds later, indicating that Brad has over-corrected and needs to cant right.  

 

 

Bullets stitch across the hood and a second grenade lands with a heart-juddering THOOMP in the road just two paces off their front bumper, spraying the windshield with rocks and earth.  

 

Samsoon ducks, a thin rivulet of blood tracing its way through the dust on his face.  “Straight now,” he says breathlessly, and then he’s gone again up the rabbit hole.

 

Brad risks a chance to lean out his window and look backwards at road behind them.  He sees a spot where it widens into a bomb crater that the Humvee should have no trouble handling, and he reverses into it.  As he drops it into park, Samsoon opens up on the .50 and starts giving it back to the enemy.  At the same time, Arman hops out, using the front fender for cover, and starts firing in six-round bursts; Nang, behind Darab, fires from his window.

 

With a pirate’s smirk at Brad, Darab joins the fray.

 

Because he’s the driver, Brad’s first duty is to stay where he is, but that doesn’t mean he can’t get some of his own.  Bracing his right foot against the floor between the brake and the accelerator, Brad pulls himself half out of the Humvee’s window and aims over the windshield.  It’s an awkward angle, but he can make out muzzle flashes from the steep incline to the northeast, and he takes a breath, steadies his hands, and unleashes short bursts of accurate fire.

 

With their combined response—and obviously superior aim—they drive back the enemy until the bad guys’ barrage slows and then diminishes to haphazard potshots that miss the Humvee entirely.

 

When Samsoon reappears in the cab, his grin is bloody, his face filthy, and he’s shaking with adrenaline.  Darab says something to the young man, and Samsoon lets out a victory cry, the others in the cab taking up the chorus until Brad’s ears are ringing—though that might be from percussion shock, too.

 

They try the ravine again, but this time, one of Darab’s men has dismounted and is leading the Humvee.  When they find the IED, Brad puts Darab in the driver’s seat and gets out to blow it in place.  They back up, hunker down, and set it off.

 

It shoots a geyser of earth sixty feet in the air, and the shock wave reverberates like the roar of a restive beast as the sound is amplified by the soaring mountain walls around the wadi.

 

Crossing the shallow stream at the bottom of the bank is anticlimactic.

 

“Good day,” Darab says with a deep-throated laugh when they’ve cleared the rise and the road opens up.  “Good.”

 

“That it is, my friend,” Brad agrees, laughing right back.

 

*****

 

Shahzar is waiting with four men, three armed with the ubiquitous AK-47s and one with a beat-up M4 that had clearly been part of a US soldier’s gear at one time or another.  Nate tries hard not to think about how the insurgent got his hands on it.  Or how he himself might be putting more American guns in those hands.

 

Shahzar sports a Lee Enfield rifle in beautiful condition, lovingly preserved and polished until the mellow wood of the stock shines even in the overcast light of the clearing.

 

Nate doesn’t see the boy who’d acted as interpreter for Shahzar, and while his conscience is grateful for the boy’s absence, he worries a little about how he and Shahzar are going to communicate.

 

As it turns out, Shahzar has almost flawless English, heavily accented but with a British lilt that indicates the man had been educated abroad.   Shahzar smirks knowingly at having put one over on Nate and welcomes him, making a broad, sweeping gesture, as if the plateau were his living room, and saying, “Welcome, Mr. Frazier.  Please, join us for tea.”

 

There’s a delicate china tea service on a filigreed silver tray set carefully on a box that had once held grenades.  On the ground on either side of the box are pillows.  As Shahzar gracefully sinks onto one, Nate does his best to likewise be seated.

 

Shahzar pours the tea as AK Guy Number One offers a plate of nuts and dried fruits.  Observing the custom, Nate takes a few of the choicer offerings and sips his chai without blowing on it first, absorbing the sting of the burning hot liquid and smiling over his cup at Shahzar.

They exchange meaningless pleasantries while they dine.  Shahzar remarks on the weather, and Nate offers observations about the likelihood of a good yield from this year’s newly planted crops.  Shahzar talks about his years at Cambridge and asks after Nate’s education.

 

Nate went to Dartmouth, but Nick Frazier attended Queen’s University in Kingston before dropping out to join the Canadian Army, where he’d learned more practical skills and had his first experience with mercenaries.

 

“The rest is history, as they say,” Nate demurs, finishing his tea and setting the cup carefully back in its saucer.

 

“And so should this negotiation be,” Shahzar answers, rising from the tea service and making another gesture, this time to indicate a target range he’s had constructed at the far end of the plateau.  Bolts have been driven into the rock where the face of the mountain rises out of the plateau, and on the bolts are hung targets, instead of typical black silhouettes, they’ll be shooting at faceless figures in red, white, and blue.  

 

“For the guns,” he explains needlessly.  Then he gestures in the direction of the plateau’s edge.  “Below, you will find targets for the larger weapons.

 

A chill shivers down Nate’s spine as he peers over the edge to see an American Humvee in a clearing six hundred feet below.  A quarter-klick from it is a thick-walled structure with Arabic words a foot or more high scrawled from right to left between its two small windows.  

 

“It says, ‘This is the dwelling of infidels.  May Allah bless those who kill His enemies,’” Shahzar supplies.

 

Nate shrugs, feigning disinterest.  “Works for me.  What do you want to try first?”

 

At the snap of Shahzar’s fingers, M4 Guy leads two of the men to the back of Nate’s truck, where they wait for him to approach and open the tailgate.

 

“Do you need me to demonstrate?” Nate asks, sounding bored.

 

“Surely not,” Shahzar scoffs.  “There is no weapon my men cannot handle.”

 

Nate shrugs again and watches the men unload the hardware, disguising his habitual uneasiness.  Nate Fick can be as nervous as he wants to be, but Nick Frazier just wants to make the deal and get gone.

 

The first test comes when M4 Guys picks up an M203, attaches it to his M4, sights it, loads a High-Explosive, Dual Purpose Round, and stalks to the mountain’s edge, where he aims it downward towards the Humvee.   

 

The first shot is wide, the dust plume to the left of the Humvee’s driver’s side bumper visible from their perch.

 

He reloads, sights again, and fires.  The sound of the impact drifts innocuously up to them, drowned out by the cheers of Shahzar’s men as the round punches a hole in the passenger side door and explodes in the front of the cab, rocking the Humvee onto two wheels, where it wobbles until gravity reclaims it and it settles heavily onto its blown-out tires, wallowing like a wounded rhino in the dust cloud that follows the explosion.

 

 

Nate does his best not to flinch, turning a bland smile on Shahzar and nodding appreciatively at the gunman.

 

  
Next, one of the AK guys, an unassuming-looking, slender man with a thin beard and a long face, expertly carves out a hunk of C4, threads a wire into it and sets a detonator.  Another AK guy takes it to the target wall and jogs back to where the rest of them have taken cover behind Nate’s truck.

 

With a nod from Shahzar, the bomb builder triggers the detonator and the air grows suddenly impossible to breathe as it’s sucked from their lungs by the explosion.

 

Much cheering and shouting of slogans ensues, punctuated by violent and anatomically specific threats to their American enemies.

 

Then, the rest of the crew take their turns on rest of the demo weapons.

 

Forty-five minutes later, as Nate tries to shake off the ringing in his ears and the dust settles at the base of the rock wall where American flag-patterned targets hang in singed tatters, Shahzar shakes Nate’s hand and says, “Same time, same place tomorrow, my friend?”

 

Nate laughs like Shahzar has been deliberately humorous.  “That’s not possible,” he avers.  “I don’t have the rest of the weapons.  I wasn’t going to invest on my end until I was sure of yours.”

 

Shahzar nods.  “That is good business, my friend, for you, but bad for me.  We need weapons.”

 

Nate pretends to be thinking hard about it.  Truth is, he can probably get the weapons from Jake by tomorrow, but he’s not sure he should let Shahzar call the shots.

 

“I might be able to get them to you tomorrow, but it would have to be later in the day, and I’m not hauling them up here.  The load’ll be too heavy.  It’ll kill my truck.”

 

“And perhaps that is not the only thing you worry about killing?”

 

Nate searches Shahzar’s face for any sign that the man is making a joke.

 

“What’re you talking about?”

 

“I have a reliable source who informs me that you have been visited by some rivals of mine.”

 

 _Shit_.

 

Playing it cool—it could be a ploy on Shahzar’s part, the men who’d been shadowing Nate Shahzar’s own, sent to muddy the waters—Nate shrugs.  “Guy like me is always popular in places like this.”

 

Shahzar doesn’t laugh.  It’s his turn to examine Nate’s face for his meaning.

 

“Let me be clear, Mister Frazier.  We have a deal on the guns, at the terms upon which we’ve agreed.  Your failure to deliver those guns would be a breach of the gentleman’s contract between us.   Such a failure would inevitably lead to difficulties.  And it would be a shame to bring such difficulties to the villagers who have so warmly welcomed you into their midst.”

 

His urbane expression and cultured voice do nothing at all to hide the insidious and ugly threat Shahzar is making.

 

“I assure you, Sahib, I have no other business interests in the region.”

 

“Then those men were merely delivering a message?”

 

Shahzar’s word choice is deliberate, and though nothing of his duplicity shows on his face, it’s clear that the man is aware of the night letter Nate had received and of the nature of the visit by the two insurgents this morning.  Nate struggles to maintain an easy expression; it won’t do to tip his hand to Shahzar.

 

“Yes, they had some warning for me regarding the dangers of the mountains.”

 

“Looking after your welfare in hospitable terms, perhaps?” Shahzar questions.

 

“Yes,” Nate answers.

  
“Good, good.”  Shahzar’s smile is shark-like, cold and predatory.  “We wouldn’t want you to feel that you were not at home in our country.”

 

Since Afghanistan is no more Shahzar’s country than Nate’s, Nate understands the double meaning in the words.

 

“Shall we set a place and time for the exchange?”

 

When they’ve settled on a location for the swap—a place not far from where Nate had cached these weapons, in fact—and agreed that the exchange will occur at four o’clock tomorrow afternoon, Shahzar signals that his men should give them some privacy.  They move off, carrying the weapons and ammunition crates with them as they go, leaving behind only the broken, empty boxes that had once housed guns.

 

“It would not do to say so in front of the men, you understand,” Shahzar murmurs conspiratorially.  “But it has come to my attention that you enjoy a certain…variety of social engagement.”

 

Nate’s blood turns to ice and he coughs to disguise the way his breath catches in his throat.  There can be no doubt that Shahzar is talking about Brad.  Again, Nate’s led to wonder about the connection between the insurgents on the mountain and Shahzar.  He’d have sworn there was no real contact between the two groups; from what he’d seen of the men who’d come to threaten him, they were not of the same social class nor interests as someone like Shahzar, whose foreign looks and British public school accent speak of the kind of money and power most native insurgents can only dream of.

 

“If I may recommend, there is a house in Kandahar that goes by the name ‘Ali Baba’s.’”  He shares a smirk with Nate that suggests that such a name is childish to men of their caliber, but what can you do?  “They cater to men of our discerning taste,” he continues, leering at Nate.   “All ages,” he adds, even as he extends his hand for another two-handed shake, in the style of the local people.

 

“Thank you,” Nate manages, though his throat feels like it’s full of sand.  “I will consider your recommendation the next time I’m in the city.”

 

“Do,” Shahzar repeats, moving toward his waiting crew.  “You will not be disappointed.”

When Shahzar and the men have disappeared through a narrow declivity that Nate had taken to be nothing but a shadow but that must be a passage through the mountain to a road on the other side, he climbs into his truck and sits for a long time with his hands on the wheel and his forehead resting against his hands.  His heart-rate slows discernibly as he takes a couple of deep breaths and shakes through the release of adrenaline that always follows such action.

 

As he’s driving carefully down the mountain, Nate divides his attention between not plunging to his death and considering all of the many ways in which he’s totally fucked.  He’s learned that there’s someone on the inside at his own end who’s interested in an endgame very different from Nate’s own.  And he’s discovered that Shahzar has better intel about Nate than Nate has ever had about him.

 

It seems impossible that he’ll get out of this alive.  Even assuming that he can contact Jake and get a shipment of weapons that meet Shahzar’s exacting specifications by the morning of the following day, there’s little chance of Nate safely transporting the weapons to the meeting sight.

 

For one thing, Jake can’t be trusted.

 

For another, his own people are trying to tail him, and by now they’ve probably figured out that Nate has destroyed the tracker.  That means that if he isn’t hyper-vigilant, he may very well be tagged again before the final exchange.

 

Assuming his “friends” in the mountains aren’t working for Shahzar, there’s a high probability that they’ll act against him before he has a chance to meet Jake to buy the weapons.

 

If the insurgents are actually Shahzar’s men and the threat this morning had been a feint to test Nate’s intentions regarding the weapons deal with Shazar, then there’s a chance those men could be planning to intercept the weapons between Nate’s pickup and the meeting sight.

 

All Nate knows for certain is that he doesn’t know enough to keep himself alive, and he hasn’t got any assets that he hasn’t already put into play.

 

Fleetingly, and with a piercing stab of longing, he thinks of Brad’s strength, stamina, and keen sight working in his own favor, but Nate almost immediately dismisses the idea.  He won’t drag Brad into this clusterfuck.  He’d rather Brad mourn Nate’s death than die beside him.

 

Somehow, Nate’s got to get the weapons to Shahzar without being double-crossed by either side, endangering the people of Ghar Waale, or dying.

 

  
He figures he’ll be lucky to manage two of the three.

 

 _Better odds than some days_ , he thinks, and then he starts figuring the long-shot.

 

**18 April 2006.  0700 local time.  Firebase Shkin.  Bermel District, Paktika Province, Afghanistan.**

 

Taylor had left the day’s orders with a subordinate and was nowhere to be found in the operations center when Brad had checked in earlier that morning.  The orders were straightforward enough, a repeat of yesterday’s save for the location:  they’d be travelling the dangerous road to the village of Shkin and patrolling the market there.

 

Shkin hadn’t been much of a village until the firebase had been built.  Now it was a teeming market of pseudo-Afghani crafts, real Afghani food, and ample opportunity for suicide bombers to murder their way into heaven.

 

If the road to Shkin didn’t kill them, the market itself might.

 

Still, while the typical CTPT didn’t work in public places like Shkin, trained for more covert, remote work in the mountains, someone had to make the day’s show of force, and Brad’s team had been tapped.

 

If it bothers Darab, Samsoon, or the other two men to be surrounded by shouting villagers, they don’t show it.  Stone-faced, they cradle their weapons at the ready and keep their eyes peeled for suspicious activity.

 

Here, so near the market, the usual outhouse odor of a place without indoor plumbing is overwhelmed by the spicy scents of freshly prepared food.  If Brad hadn’t learned his lesson about intestinal parasites five years and three tours ago, he’d be tempted to buy something from one of the vendors hawking his wares less than an arm’s length from the driver’s side window.

 

Instead, Brad’s keeping his eyes on the sideview, where through the road dust he sees a young man on a motorbike insinuating his way between the foot and donkey-cart traffic, rapidly approaching the Humvee.

 

“Negah kon! She! She!” Brad orders sharply, alerting Arman, who’s sitting behind him, that there’s trouble on their nine.

 

Samsoon, once again in the turret, shouts a warning to the cyclist, who gives the Pashtun equivalent of the bird as he speeds up to overtake them.

 

The cyclist probably knows that it’s policy for US military vehicles to avoid contact in areas where civilian casualties are a possibility.  Here in the crowded market, there’s no way Samsoon will open up with the .50.

 

Likewise, Brad can’t order Arman to fire a warning shot.  He’d learned in Iraq what could happen even with the best of intentions and simple smoke grenades.

 

As the lawnmower buzz of the motorbike’s engine grows loud and the young man nears the rear bumper of the Humvee, Brad slams on the brakes and watches with satisfaction as the kid overshoots them.  He laughs as he passes in front of them, waving that same rude gesture in the air over his shoulder, and then he cuts a sharp right into a narrow alley ahead.

 

Immediately, Darab’s eyes fasten on the alleyway.  Overhead, Brad can hear Samsoon turning the fifty that way, too.

 

He’s got a good team.

 

Idly, Brad wonders what Nate is doing that morning.  Unbidden, an image of the way he’d left Nate the day before, fucked out and flushed on the ruined mattress in Nate’s dim hut, his damp skin washed in the yellow light of the oil lamp, his eyes bright in the relative gloom.

 

He shakes his head and chides himself— _Stay frosty, Marine!—_ and goes back to watching the faces of the people around him, looking for the intent to harm.

 

*****

 

Something about Jake’s boonie reminds Nate of Brad, enough to momentarily distract him from keeping his eyes on Jake’s men as they load the back of his truck with the rest of the shipment of weapons Jake had been happy to supply.

 

Jake is counting the money with practiced motions, eyes flickering between the dirty bills in his hands and Nate’s face.

 

“Something wrong, mate?” Jake asks, keeping a neutral tone as he packs the last of the money away in a nondescript rucksack that he in turn stows under the driver’s seat of his truck.

 

“Nothing,” Nate answers.  “Just making sure my merchandise is carefully handled.”  In fact, once he’d wrenched his mind from visions of Brad naked and driving into him, Nate had been considering the likelihood that one of the many crates weighing down the suspension on his truck contained a tracking device.

 

His superiors knew where Nate was planning to get his weapons.  They could’ve spiked the shipment before Jake got it to him.  It’s on the tip of his tongue to ask Jake how secure his own weapons cache is when he realizes how that would sound to the arms dealer.

 

Instead, he says, “What do you hear about local insurgent groups?”

 

Jake’s shrug is the same given the world over by bystanders who refuse to acknowledge a crime: _Didn’t see anything, don’t know anything_.

 

“You know these people,” Jake says expansively, in such a way that Nate understands he’s talking not just about Afghanis but about all extremists in developing nations the world over.  “Always something up their asses.”

 

Nate joins Jake in a derisive, white man’s laugh, and watches as the last man jumps from his truck and slams the tailgate closed.  He walks over to be sure they’re securing the camo tarp properly and then turns to Jake, who’s followed him.

 

“Nice doing business with you,” he says, offering his hand.

 

Jake takes it, using it to pull Nate closer, and drops the word, “Careful,” in his ear.  That and nothing more.  But Nate catches the way Jake’s eyes track to the hills to either side of where they’re parked, and he knows that’s all the warning he’s going to get about the ambush that’s been planned.

 

Nate wonders idly who tipped Jake off or if Jake has all along been working for Nate’s bosses.

 

Last night, which he had spent sleeplessly staring at the ceiling of his hut, Nate had come to the conclusion that his superiors in the CIA were getting nervous about the potential for American weapons to end up in the hands of actual al-Qaeda-funded terrorists and had decided to hedge their bets by tracking the weapons and possibly stealing them back from Nate, leaving him with his cover intact but his current deal scuttled.

 

Maybe they figured he’d have enough pull with Shahzar to work a second deal, or maybe they didn’t care that Shahzar would probably kill Nate—and everyone in Ghar Waale—if the shipment intended for Shahzar ended up seized and/or missing.

 

Whatever the case, Nate had figured there’d be trouble today, and he guesses it doesn’t matter what Jake does or doesn’t know.  The Aussie isn’t going to share his source with Nate, and it’s better if Nate pretends to ignorance rather than tip Jake to the fact that Nate might not be the Nick Frazier Jake thinks he is.

 

Suddenly exhausted, as much by the shell game that is counterintelligence as by his lack of sleep, Nate nods to Jake and gets in his truck, waiting for Jake and his men to depart before starting up the reluctant engine of the Hilux.  Yesterday’s trip up the mountain had taken a toll on his truck, and it’s looking like a near thing which is most likely to scuttle the deal:  his bosses, Shahzar, another group of insurgents, or the laboring Toyota engine.

 

As the Hilux groans its way along the rutted track toward the road to Ghar Waale, Nate keeps his sleep-deprived eyes on the ridgeline to either side.  There’s a shoulder here, which offers him the chance to drive outside the ruts left by many vehicles before him and in turn gives him a chance to avoid any IEDs that might’ve been planted to waylay him.

 

He’s not all that nervous about blowing up, however.  Whoever’s up there watching him—and there’s a flash of weak sunlight on the glass of a sniper scope, Nate notices—wants his weapons.  Rival insurgents want to steal them; any men hired by his own government want them back, he guesses, though he knows they’d blow his truck up if it came down to necessity.

 

So when the first shot thwaps into the hood, Nate barely startles; it’s not like he wasn’t expecting it.  He continues to drive, and the next round lands six inches closer to the windshield.

 

The sniper is good, whoever he is.  This isn’t the spray-and-pray method of poorly trained jihadists.

 

He takes the third round as a final warning, narrowly missing him as it does.  The round tears through the windshield and slaps into the passenger seat with a meaty sound.

 

Nate ducks, trying to put as much engine block between himself and the gunman as possible, and floors it, risking what’s left of his suspension on the chance that he can escape the ambush.

 

Rounds stitch the radiator of the Hilux, tearing through the engine and rocking him in his seat.

 

The engine stutters, hesitates, and then shudders back to a ragged, irregular churning; he can hear the pistons chugging along as he depresses the accelerator further.  Pedal to the floor, engine screeching up to a pained whine, he moves along at twenty-five miles an hour, then thirty, the load in the bed a palpable drag.  

 

Bullets stitch the passenger side door, shatter the window and sideview mirror.  One embeds itself into the dash inches from his right hand, but Nate keeps his head down and wills the Hilux on.  

 

Fifty yards.

 

One hundred.

 

A round burrows a gouge along the rear window.  Another angles downward from the roof and buries itself in the floorboards between his feet.

 

Nate hisses out a startled breath and keeps going, waiting for a tire to blow or the engine to quit, waiting to feel hot metal arrow into his neck.  He’s turtled down until the back of his helmet is almost touching his body armor.  He’s hunched, hot, and uncomfortable.  Around him, a swarm of angry lead threatens to sting him.

 

Plastic slivers from the dash have sliced open his knuckles, and they bleed in a steady, sticky trickle onto the cracked leather of the steering wheel, slicking it and making it slippery.

 

Nate wrenches the wheel to the left, trying to avoid a crater in which he’d bottom out and wallow, and then he’s bouncing onto the road, the last of the enemy bullets pockmarking the road behind his tailgate as he straightens the Hilux out and eases off the gas.

 

When he’s got the curve of a hill between him and the side road he’d just escaped, Nate sits up and takes a full breath, hearing it shudder as it leaves him.

 

He shakes out a hand, spattering blood against the ruined upholstery of the passenger seat, and flexes his fingers, first on the right hand, then the left.  Everything seems to be in working order.

 

He swipes at sweat on his forehead and brings his fingers away stained with more blood.  Poking around, he discovers a shallow gouge along his right temple, just above his eyebrow and just below the rim of his helmet.  Another nick on his cheek makes itself felt as the salt of sweat mingles with the thin stream of blood.

 

Funny how the little wounds hurt like a bitch, a truism he’d discovered long ago.  

 

With another shaking expulsion of breath, Nate coasts the Hilux onto a pull-off created by a mortar impact sometime in the past.  He climbs out of the truck, pleased that his knees, though watery, still hold him, and lets the adrenaline crash wash a wave of weariness through him by steadying his hands against the window frame.

 

When his heart-rate has evened out, he drops the tailgate on the truck and climbs into the bed, pulling the concealing tarp away as he does.  In this spot, he’ll hear anyone coming by vehicle at least a half mile away, and the urgency of his need to find and dispose of a possible tracker is greater than his fear of getting caught with the load.

 

The only ones who patrol the road with regularity anyway are the forces at FB Shkin, and though it might be difficult to explain a civilian aid worker hauling a truckload of US weapons, Nate knows he could manage it.

 

In fact, if it happened to be Brad on patrol…

 

Nate dismisses that thought with a rueful shake of his head.  _Eyes on the prize, Fick_ , he reminds himself, starting the slow, tedious work of searching for a tiny, transmitting needle in a huge, dangerous haystack.

 

It’s going to be a long afternoon.

 

*****

 

Brad thinks it might be a sign that he’s been in-country too long when the morning wears on into early afternoon and he’s disappointed by the lack of enemy contact.  They’ve stopped twice to do basic recon, once so that the team could buy kebab from a vendor, and once for a dead goat in the middle of the road.  

 

“It might be bomb,” Samsoon warns, an unnecessary admonition.  Brad’s familiar with the dead-animal-decoy technique.

 

The animal is crawling with flies, the stink almost visible from where they sit.  The street is too narrow for them to go around it, and if they straddle it and there’s someone out there with a detonator, they’re fucked.

 

Their best bet is to just back up and go a different route.  They don’t need to patrol this particular street, and anyone he sent out to check out the goat would be in danger of being blown up.  No sense taking needless chances.

  
Just as he’s craning out the window to look for a reverse route, two little boys run out into the street, grab the legs of the goat—one the back legs, one the front—and drag it out of the way.

 

The taller of the two boys races back to the road, beaming and with his hand extended, and asks for “Candy!” a word that in Afghanistan is loosely defined as sweets to eat, paper on which to draw, or even a pencil, much-dulled by hard use on maps against a bouncing dash, which is what Brad gives him, leaning out a second time to offer a broken red grease pencil to the other boy.

 

They leave, chattering their thanks, and before Brad’s even got the Humvee in drive, a mob of children have emerged from a nearby doorway and surrounded the front end of the vehicle, all of them taking up the familiar chant.

 

Candy is probably the only word in English they know, and they intend to get the most mileage they can out of it.

 

Unfortunately for the kids, Brad’s team hadn’t set out on a goodwill patrol, so the best Brad can do is bottled water and a few draggle-eared bandage rolls.  Prizes distributed, kids shouting happily—one of them already being wrapped tightly in the rapidly dirtying bandages—Brad pulls away.

Just as he’s nearing an intersection of two larger streets, the radio crackles to life, and he receives orders to return to base.

 

Acknowledging the orders, Brad takes the left and winds his way back through the labyrinthine streets of Shkin, wondering what the change in orders means.  Knowing better than to ask, he’s content to wait and see.

 

Beside him, Darab says nothing.  Overhead, in the gun turret, Samsoon is singing something at the top of his voice, and though it’s in Dari, Brad can’t help but think of Ray belting out some tune or other while Brad tried to concentrate on the force tracker.  He wonders idly if there’s an Afghani equivalent for country music and then shakes his head at himself and says, “Keep an eye out for IEDs,” as they leave Shkin in their dust and take to the dangerous road back to the firebase.

 

Though there’s less than a klick between the village and the FB, it takes them twenty minutes to make the trip.  They arrive to find Captain Taylor waiting impatiently beside the guard shack at the first gate into the firebase.  He jogs out with his hand raised, stopping Brad before he can maneuver the Humvee into the cattle chute that leads to the first checkpoint.

 

“You’re heading to Ghar Waale,” Taylor orders, tone brusque and expression closed.  He’s clearly inviting no response but immediate compliance.  

 

Brad ignores the signals.  “Anything we need to know, sir?” 

 

Taylor gives Brad an unfriendly look.  “Just get there, Sergeant.  And don’t stop for anything.  This isn’t a goodwill visit.”

 

The subtext is clear—the team should expect contact with the enemy in Ghar Waale, making that their primary mission.

 

Brad’s heart kicks up a beat when he considers the trouble Nate might be in.

 

“Any adjustment to the ROE, sir?”

 

Standard ROE currently is to avoid firing their weapons if there’s even a remote chance of civilian casualties resulting from said action.

 

Taylor nods grimly, “Shoot to kill, sergeant, and don’t struggle over the grey areas.”

 

Brad wonders how Taylor’s free-fire zone meshes with military policy and further considers how likely Taylor is to disavow his words if the whole thing goes pear-shaped.  Something stinks about the whole situation, and he has a feeling he’s about to get FUBARed.

 

Maybe he’s tired of fighting.  Maybe he’s just sick of being jerked around.  

 

Maybe he wants to see Nate and fuck the consequences.

  
Brad knows he’s not thinking clearly, and he also doesn’t care.  

 

“Yes sir,” he acknowledges, and if his tone is sardonic, Taylor is either too distracted or too disgusted to indicate it.

 

He slaps the hood of the Humvee, and Brad takes his foot off the brake.

 

“We’re headed to Ghar Waale,” he calls up to Samsoon, who translates it to the others.

 

Beside him, Darab maintains his characteristic stoic expression, and Brad settles in for a long, bumpy ride.

 

*****

 

Forty sweaty, frustrating minutes after he began his search, Nate has found the tracker, this time cleverly hidden among the detonating caps tucked into the crate with the C-4.  He’s trying to decide what to do with it when he hears the grinding gears of a heavy vehicle approaching from the southeast.

 

 _Shit_ , he thinks, hastening to secure the camo tarp over his load and position himself out of sight on the truck’s far side.  He’s between the mountain wall and his load, and he has to hope that whoever it is doesn’t shoot first and ask questions later or there won’t be enough left of him to identify after the fireball has dissipated.

 

He breathes a sigh of relief to see the familiar, snub-nosed contour of a military Humvee making its cautious way around the curve to the south of Nate’s position.

 

It slows when it nears, and Nate sees Brad in the driver’s seat, an Afghani kid on the .50 already swinging its lethal nose in Nate’s direction.  He steps out from behind the truck, tucking his gun into the holster at his back, and puts his arms up.  He’s smiling, but the kid on the gun remains serious, and the scowling face of the older Afghani in the passenger seat is likewise unresponsive.

 

Nate sees that he’s covered by another Afghani from the rear of the passenger seat.

 

He watches Brad stop far enough back from the truck that the .50 is still effective—standard protocol for a road stop, Nate knows, but still a little worrisome.

 

Then Brad says something to the kid on the big gun, and he shifts the barrel, targeting unseen potential enemies on the ridge beyond Nate’s position.

 

Brad himself hops out of the driver’s seat, but he leaves the Humvee running, Nate notes.  So this isn’t a social visit.

 

“Engine trouble?” Brad asks as he approaches, cradling his M-4 in a way that makes Nate strangely homesick for his own Marine days.

 

Nate shakes his head and holds up the tracker.  Its green light winks merrily in the air between them.

 

Brad raises an eyebrow but says nothing, and Nate shrugs.  “Guess I’m not to be trusted with the merchandise.”  He tries to make it sound like it happens all the time.  

 

By Brad’s expression, it’s obvious he isn’t buying it.

 

“Need help with that?”

 

“Actually…”  Nate considers, and he watches Brad understand Nate’s thought process even before he can finish it.  

 

“Want me to take it for a little ride and then drop it off somewhere up the road?”

 

“Yeah, that’d be great,” Nate answers, smiling.  “Just let it keep transmitting when you do.”

 

“Yes, sir,” Brad answers, his voice dropping down the register, which sends a jolt of sense memory up Nate’s spine.

 

“Stop that,” he says, but they both know he doesn’t mean it.

 

“Yes, sir,” Brad repeats, tucking the transmitter into a pocket on his vest.  His heated gaze rakes Nate’s features.  Then his eyes lose their teasing luster as he scans them over Nate’s concealed load.  “You need back-up?”

 

Nate shakes his head, feeling the last of the lust drain from him.  “No.  Besides, I don’t think you’re authorized for that mission.”

 

Brad’s acknowledges Nate’s observation with a nod.

 

  
“Where are _you_ going?” Nate asks, narrowing his eyes as a suspicion strikes him.

 

Brad shakes his head, but he lets his eyes stray up the road.

 

Nate doesn’t need Brad to say another word; there isn’t that much up the road from where they’ve stopped.  

 

 _Shit_ , that means someone on the other end of things thinks Ghar Waale might be a target.  _Probably because they made it so_ , he adds silently, struggling to keep the anger and worry from his face.

 

To Brad, he presents the bland, friendly smile he gives to anyone he’s trying to convince, but Brad only snorts and says, “I’ll see you on the flip side,” as he turns away.

 

“Brad, wait,” Nate calls, hating himself for the sudden weak urge to spill it all to Brad.  “Just…be careful.  There’s more than one _interest_ involved in things up the way.”

 

That’s the most he can give, knowing as he does how information can perpetuate the very future he’s hoping to avoid for Brad.  The less Brad knows, the better it is for him.  Knowledge kills just as surely as it saves.  

 

Brad closes the space between them, putting his broad shoulders firmly between Nate and the view of the Humvee.  The kid on the .50 might be able to make out what he’s doing, but the rest of the men can only speculate.

 

Brad takes his hand from where he’s cradling the stock of his rifle and rests it against the dirty expanse of Nate’s neck where it clears his body armor.  His thumb brushes restlessly against the exposed skin, and Nate hisses, both at the electricity Brad sparks with his touch and at the sting of the cut on his neck as Brad deliberately abrades it.

 

It’s fucked up, unsanitary, and intimate, and it arrows straight to Nate’s cock.  He sucks in a loud breath and tries to show Brad with his eyes exactly what Brad’s touch is doing to him.

 

By the knowing smirk that curls Brad’s lip, Nate guesses that Brad had intended that very reaction.

 

“I’m going to fuck you up against this truck the first chance I get,” he promises, and the tenor of his voice, the rough growl of it, makes Nate harder.

 

“Yeah?” he comes back weakly, his own voice wrecked, like Brad’s been fucking his throat for an hour.

 

“Yeah.  Consider it motivation to get in and get gone without getting your ass shot.”

 

“Sir, yes sir,” Nate says at barely above a whisper.

 

Brad’s answering grin is filthy, and Nate licks his suddenly dry lips, watching as Brad’s eyes track the movement.

 

“I’ve got to go,” Nate manages in a tone closer to normal.

 

The stretch of skin where Nate’s pulse jumps in his neck feels cold when Brad takes his hand away.

 

“Stay frosty,” Brad jaunts, grinning at Nate as he turns away, this time striding purposefully back to the Humvee and mounting up.

 

From the turret, the kid gives Nate a knowing look and waves as they pull past Nate’s truck and head up the road to Ghar Waale.

 

Nate returns the wave with a bemused smile and wonders what the kid thinks he knows about him and Brad.  

 

Could be the kid knows more than Nate does, he thinks as he gets into the cab of his truck and turns the tired engine over.  Despite recent evidence to the contrary, Nate’s still not sure what Brad wants from him besides the obvious.

 

Letting go of the distraction that is Brad Colbert, Nate pulls out onto the road.  He’s got an hour to cover twenty-two klicks of goat-fucked roads that would ordinarily require twice that to navigate in a truck much better equipped to handle it than his.

 

Showing up late is going to piss Shahzar off, but Nate figures there’s no use crying over spilt milk.  Brad’s personal orders to Nate in mind, he puts the pedal to the floor and ignores the complaining shriek of the overworked engine.  

 

*****

 

Thirty mikes after leaving Nate behind, Brad stops the Humvee long enough to jump out and deposit the still-broadcasting tracker in a niche of rock well off the road, where it won’t be crushed by passing foot or vehicle traffic.

 

Another thirty mikes later, Brad stops the Humvee again just before the last turn to Ghar Waale, the village approximately three-quarters of a klick away.  The wide buttress of a tall mountain blocks them from the view of the road ahead or the long, rocky slide down into the valley where the miserable village sits, and Brad figures it’s the last chance they’ll have to confer before they have to look sharp.

 

He leaves the engine running but gets out and orders the team to dismount.  With Samsoon beside his father next to Brad and Arman and Nang around the front of the hood, Brad spreads out a map of Ghar Waale and explains what he knows of the village and its layout, how many people live there, how many structures there are, and what’s beyond the narrow valley to the north.

 

In general terms, he fills them in on the insurgents spotted in the hills around the village and on Nate’s night letter, explaining that the man they just met along the road is a civilian aid worker who is trying to set up a clinic in the village but is being harassed by bad guys.

 

When Brad calls for questions, Darab asks something sharp and terse, and Samsoon translates.

 

“He says that if the bad men are not interested in the village but only in the doctor, our coming to the village will make the people there a target.”

 

Brad nods.  “Yes, that’s true.”  He’d already thought of that himself, of course, but orders are orders, and anyway, he has a feeling there’s shit going on here that’s way above his pay grade.

 

“Will we stay to defend the people?” Samsoon asks.

 

“That depends on our orders,” Brad answers, hating the words even as he says them.  It’s not right to hang these people out to dry if the bad guys don’t want to tangle with a team of highly trained Afghani counterinsurgents and their US Marine trainer.

 

“It’s not right,” Samsoon insists.  Beside him, Darab mutters something darkly that Samsoon does not translate.

 

“Yeah, I know that,” Brad answers.  The team moves away from him, closing him out, speaking rapidly to one another.  He hasn’t developed enough of a rapport with them, even given their recent contact with the enemy, to be able to rely on them to trust his judgment on this.

 

Besides, his judgment is warring with his gut, and Brad’s learned the lesson hard and often that he ignores his gut at his peril.

 

The team is still talking, voices rapid and angry, when Brad scuffs his boot deliberately against the dirt of the road and waits for them to stop talking.  Darab and Samsoon turn to him, expressions dark and closed off.

 

“You know, I think that radio’s been on the fritz,” he observes, trusting Samsoon to interpret the slang term.  “I’m not sure we’re going to be able to get orders all the way out here.”

 

Samsoon translates for Darab, whose face transforms with a slow-growing, conspiratorial smile.  He barks something to Nang, who jogs over to the passenger front door, opens it, and leans in.  He emerges moments later with a handful of wiring and a pirate’s grin.

 

“Guess we’re on our own.  Last orders from base were to protect the village, so that’s what we do until someone comes along in person to deliver other orders.”

 

Brad ignores the swoop of unease he feels at the blatant insubordination he’s inciting among the men of the CTPT and shakes off a shiver of discomfort at recognizing that they’re truly on their own now.  There’s no way for him to call in air support if things get heavy in Ghar Waale.  Even if Nate had left behind his SAT phone, Brad doesn’t know the frequency.

 

They’re deep in Indian country with no cavalry to ride to their rescue and nothing to rely on but their own firepower, teamwork, and skills.

 

Laughing a little and joining Darab in his maniacal smile, Brad says, “Saddle up!” and heads for his place in the driver’s seat.  Maybe his career after this can be numbered in days rather than years, but Brad feels for the first time in a long time like he might be able to effect some actual, positive change in Afghanistan, at least for the people of the village Nate calls home.

 

 

“Good day,” Darab says, teeth like daggers against the ruddiness of his lips.

 

“Fuckin’ A,” Brad concurs, starting the Humvee and putting the pedal down.

 

*****

 

Nate is almost two hours late to the meet with Shahzar, and the shadows are growing worryingly long on the east side of the mountain where he’d sited the exchange.

 

In those shadows, at least a dozen armed men lurk, looking deceptively lazy as they lean against the scattered boulders of an ancient rockfall and cradle their guns almost carelessly.

  
Nate isn’t fooled.  They’ve taken the best positions in the bowl-shaped wadi, where the river that cuts through it narrows to a roaring cascade and leaves space on either side of the road for parking.  They’ve blocked the route by which they came, down from the north, and have their three trucks ranged in a semi-circle, bed-mounted machine guns all facing toward Nate’s position.

 

They’ve also made it impossible for him to turn around quickly, and they watch him make a six-point turn to get the load-side facing their position.  As he puts his truck in park, two men, each armed with RPG-7s, block the road to the south.

  
He’s not going anywhere.

 

Shahzar takes his time getting out of his truck, making a point of disdaining Nate’s tardiness.

 

On his part, Nate makes a show of careless disregard for the arsenal tracking his every move, and he ignores the way two more men converge on the tailgate of his pick-up.  Instead of looking at them, he looks at their leader.

 

  
“No guns until I see the money,” he says clearly, getting right to business.  In other circumstances, it would be an insult for Nate to initiate proceedings in that fashion.  Since he set the meeting place and time, he’s technically the host of the gathering, and he’s supposed to offer hospitality to Shahzar and his men.  
  


But it’s more likely to rain virgins than it is for Nate to serve these fuckers tea.

 

Shahzar intones an order without raising his voice, and Nate assumes that means the two men at his truck are standing down for the moment.  He doesn’t dare look, or he’ll appear weak.

 

“I was beginning to think you were going to renege on our agreement, Mr. Frazier,” Shahzar notes as Nate halts a few feet away from the man and pointedly ignores the firepower all around them.

 

“I had some difficulty securing the shipment,” Nate offers vaguely, making it sound like a statement of fact and nothing at all like the excuse that it is. 

 

“I hope it is not the sort of difficulty that is likely to follow you.”  Shahzar’s voice expresses his displeasure, but Nate plays it cool, shrugging elaborately and saying, “Nothing for you to worry about.”

 

“Well, of course, I’ll have to take your word for it.”  The disdain in his voice is like a slap in the face, but Nate refuses to rise to the bait.

 

 

“Money, please,” Nate repeats, keeping his eyes steady on Shahzar.

 

Shahzar makes a tsking noise and wags his finger as though Nate has done something naughty.  “Mr. Frazier, your manners seem to have escaped you since we last met.”

 

“It’s getting dark, and I have places to be, Sahib Shahzar.  I don’t want to be rude, but I’d like to finish this transaction before the sun sets.”  He forces his words to sound impatient instead of desperate, but he wonders how much difference there is between the two.  He’s outgunned and blocked in, and by the way Shahzar is playing with him, Nate has every reason to think he’s fucked six ways from Sunday.

 

“Very well.”  With a snap of his fingers, Shahzar summons the largest Arab Nate has ever seen; easily seven feet tall, broad across the shoulder and with a hard belly that precedes him by at least a foot, the guy is huge.  He’s swarthy of complexion and with a nose so severely hooked, he wheezes as he breathes.

 

“Sinbad will show you your earnings, Mr. Frazier.”  Shahzar shares a knowing smirk with Nate over the giant’s pseudonym, and Nate smiles thinly in response.

 

As Sinbad nears, it becomes apparent even in the fading light of late day that the man is simple-minded.  His eyes track lazily in different directions, and he wears a vacant expression that suggests he’s either medicated or mentally disabled.  Or both, Nate supposes.

 

“Sinbad is one of our most beloved followers,” Shahzar says, as though reading Nate’s mind.  His casual tone belies the seriousness of the exchange, as though they’re sitting together over a chess game with a steaming pot of chai, not completing an arms deal in the enemy-rife mountains.  “He’s a eunuch, of course; otherwise, he’d be quite impossible to control.  His parents sold him to me when he was only a boy.  I enjoyed his company for many years before he grew unfortunately fractious and had to be lobotomized.  I’m sure you find it barbaric, but it really is the most humane solution for children like Sinbad.  And he will always have a place in my company.”

 

The giant smiles at the sound of his name and holds out an olive drab rucksack with a nondescript patch on it.

 

“Open the sack for Mr. Frazier, Sinbad,” Shahzar instructs, anticipating Nate’s next request.

 

In the gloom of lengthening shadows, Nate can just make out money-shaped stacks.  He reaches into a pocket for a flashlight and hears the telltale snicks of a chorus of guns being readied.

 

Without acknowledging his danger, Nate pulls out a mini-Maglite and clicks it on, examining the contents of the rucksack and looking carefully for tripwires.

 

When he’s satisfied that all the money is there and that the sack has not been booby-trapped, Nate nods and gestures to the truck.  

 

“Care to check the contents?”  He holds out a handwritten inventory, which Shahzar indicates that one of the two men near the tailgate of Nate’s truck should take.

 

The man snatches the paper, and Nate can just make out his expression of confusion in the darkness.  It’s doubtful he can read his own language, much less Nate’s.

 

Shahzar gives an order in a short, sharp burst of sound, and from his truck, the boy appears.  As he nears, Nate can see that his eyes are once again lined in kohl.  He’s bare-chested, his nipples newly pierced, red and swollen, gold hoops glinting in the last of the afternoon light.  Bangles at his wrists and ankles tinkle as he moves.  The diaphanous material of his harem pants leaves little to the imagination, and Nate winces at how thin the boy is and at the bruises along his abdomen and around his slender biceps.

 

Nate makes a point of ignoring the boy as he sways past him, though he’s pretty sure the kid puts more shimmy in his hips, perhaps hoping Nate will reconsider taking him with him when he goes.

 

One kid’s enough, he thinks, and then he hates himself a little for putting expediency over the life of a child.  Sinbad is evidence enough of what happens to Shahzar’s toys when they outgrow their appeal.

 

Still, the situation is too unpredictable to add another variable, and though Nate is loath to leave a kid in such conditions, it wouldn’t help the boy at all for Nate himself to die trying to free him.

 

The inventory takes a few minutes; the men are thorough in their inspection and impatient with the boy’s translations.  Nate feels for the kid—just because he has a little English doesn’t mean he can read worth a damn—but he doesn’t intervene.  Instead, he stands between his truck and Sinbad, who’s holding the money as insurance against fraud on Nate’s part, and tries to look unconcerned.

 

Behind Shahzar, his men have moved casually into positions of greater power, and when he spares a glance for them, Nate sees that the two men blocking his truck have shifted so that the bulk of the truck’s engine block is between themselves and Nate.

 

Once the truck is emptied of its contents—a process beginning even as Nate notices the changes in Shahzar’s men’s behavior—there will be no reason at all not to fire on Nate; he’ll be cut down in a fierce crossfire.

 

So will Sinbad, Nate notes, but he supposes the man’s life really isn’t much of a guarantee.  Mind working furiously over exit strategies and potential cover, Nate shifts a little to his left, putting Shahzar in the same line of fire as he is, effectively depriving at least four of Shahzar’s men of a clean shot at Nate.

 

Four other men have formed a ragged bucket line to pass crates from Nate’s truck to Shahzar’s trucks.  Their hands are empty of weapons at the moment, and he can count on perhaps thirty seconds of confused delay before those men might be ready to shoot at him.

 

That still leaves five men, including two with RPG-7s, who can handily kill Nate in seconds.  Even if Nate were able to clear his gun from the holster at the small of his back and shoot two or three of them, that would leave some who could kill him where he stands.

 

Of course, the disadvantage to big weapons like rocket launchers is that their payload is somewhat indiscriminate, and they aren’t designed for close combat situations.  If he ignores the two blocking his truck on the far end of the clearing and focuses on the three drivers, each of whom has taken up a defensive position using the open driver’s side doors of the three trucks, he might just have a shot at surviving this clusterfuck, particularly if he’s moving as he makes the shot.

 

Nate’s running through scenarios in his head, considering possible cover, when he sees that the man in his truck bed is passing the second-to-last crate out of the vehicle.

 

  
 _Now or never_ , he tells himself, taking a breath and shifting his weight to the balls of his feet.

 

 

He moves as if to approach Sinbad for the cash, letting the man’s bulk block his movement toward the pistol at his back, and listens hard for a reaction from the men behind him.

 

Seemingly preoccupied with the last of the weapons load, none of them reacts as Nate pulls his gun and sights the first driver, aiming for the face, which glows palely in the dying light.  He doesn’t wait to see the pink mist as his bullet finds its target, already drilling the second driver, who stumbles backward with a cry.

 

Second shot echoing in the mountain twilight, Nate hears the first response as one of the men behind him opens fire.  The shots are wild, and he shuts them out, focusing on the third driver, who has ducked down behind the door, making himself as small a target as possible.

 

Nate has reached the first truck now and has stepped over the body of the driver to take up a position behind the armored door.  He reaches down for the man’s AK-47, gives the weapon a cursory once-over, and sets it to semi-automatic.

 

With controlled, even bursts, he kills two of the men who’d been hauling weapons and been caught in the middle of the wide open field when the firing had started.  A third is already down, presumably hit by one of his own people.

 

The boy is nowhere to be seen, and Nate hopes he had the sense to duck behind Nate’s truck.  Sinbad is bellowing and crying, clutching the rucksack to his chest and acting as a human shield from behind which Shahzar is taking careful aim at Nate’s position.

 

An RPG screams out of the sky and strikes with ground-shattering force behind him, showering him in clods of earth and rock shrapnel.  Dizzy and disoriented, Nate ducks into the cab of the truck and tries to shake off the wooziness of concussion; he’s still there when a second RPG strikes the ground just in front of the truck.  

 

Rocks and dirt pelt the windshield.  The glass spiderwebs in a half-dozen spots, turning the world beyond it into a fractal mess, but it remains intact, and Nate takes a few deep breaths to try to clear the ringing in his head before he jumps back to the ground and aims again for Shahzar.

 

Sinbad is still crying in the midst of the fray, but Shahzar is no longer behind him.  He’s reached Nate’s truck and is gesticulating wildly at one of the RPG guys, probably telling him off for endangering the load in the back of the truck Nate’s using for cover.

 

When the shot comes, Nate thinks at first it must be the third driver, the one he hadn’t gotten before he’d taken cover himself behind Shahzar’s truck.

 

It feels like a super-heated worm burrowing its way into his ribcage.  Fire shoots down his flank from just under his armpit to where his armor meets the waistband of his cargo pants, and for a crazy, lost moment, Nate’s sure he’s got fire-ants inside his vest.

  
Then he feels the seeping heat of blood spreading along the underarm of his shirt and trickling down his right arm at the same time as he loses feeling in his fingers and his hand slips from the trigger of the AK-47.  The barrel of the gun tilts upward, and he has to grasp weakly with his left hand to keep from dropping it altogether.

 

 _I’m hit_ , he thinks then, and his vision swims as he tries to take a deep breath and can’t.  Panicking, Nate leans against the driver’s seat, running board cutting into his thigh.  He tries to assess the damage to his side, but it’s all up under his vest.

 

A bullet whines into the visor on the driver’s side and brings Nate back to the immediate moment. 

 

Right.  Firefight.

 

With a Herculean effort, Nate grips the steering wheel with his left hand and pulls himself awkwardly back into the cab of the truck.  He has to rest to catch what’s left of his breath before reaching out to close the door.

 

Only when he’s inside does he start to assess the situation.

 

Just before a bullet shatters the side-view mirror, Nate sees three men in black turbans and olive shirts over baggy black pants creeping up behind Shahzar’s trucks.

 

Eyes tracking to the fight in front of him, he sees that Sinbad is down, unmoving, and Shahzar himself is directing his remaining forces from behind Nate’s truck, which is already sagging on shot-out tires.

 

As Nate watches, the breadth of the windshield of his old Hilux is stitched with bullets.

 

The nearest insurgent is almost to the tailgate of the truck Nate is in, and in a moment of piercing clarity, he realizes this might be his last chance at escape.

 

Grateful that the keys are in the ignition, Nate turns the truck over, happy to hear the engine purr to vibrating life.  It’s awkward to put the truck in gear because his right arm is useless, but he manages with his left hand, thanking whatever powers there might be that Shahzar prefers automatic transmissions.  Manual would’ve meant Nate’s sure death.

 

He tromps on the gas as the three insurgents shift their attention to Nate’s truck and open fire.

 

Ducking low over the wheel, eyes just clearing the dash, Nate steers for the opening between his truck and the cliff, taking fire from both Shahzar’s men and the insurgents at his rear.

  
The truck bucks as an armor-piercing round nails the tailgate, the force of it driving the rear wheels off the ground.  The round must miss the load and divert out the side of the bed because it doesn’t come through the cab, which is full of the tinkle of broken glass as a lucky bullet shatters the rearview mirror, showering Nate with needle-sharp slivers of glass.

 

Wrenching the wheel, he narrowly misses Sinbad’s prone body, and seconds later he’s even with his truck.

 

Only one of Shahzar’s men is still standing, and as Nate watches, he abandons the RPG-7 in favor of an old M-4 that he’d had slung low across his chest.  He aims it at Nate just as Nate sees a strange tableau:  Shahzar’s boy, eyes wild, teeth gleaming in the intermittent light of muzzle flashes, raising his hands, which hold Nate’s back-up pistol, the one he’d always kept under the driver’s side seat of his truck.

  
They’re close enough that Nate can see the boy’s chest rising and falling, and if it weren’t for the percussion of war all around, he thinks he could hear the desperate scream the boy unleashes as he raises the gun and starts to fire it into Shahzar, who’s oblivious to the boy’s action, focused as he is on aiming his own pistol at Nate’s head.

 

Shahzar’s gun goes off—Nate sees the flash in the darkness—but the shot goes wide, Shahzar already spinning, hand losing its grip on the butt, arms going wide, crucifixion-style, as the boy pumps another and then another bullet into the man.

 

And then he’s past them all, bullets splatting into the rear driver’s side quarter-panel as he slews the truck to the left to keep from driving straight off the mountain.  His front tires hit the ruts in the goat track, and he bounces hard enough that his head strikes the ceiling.

 

His teeth clack together around his tongue, and pain, hot and slicing, drives a moan out of him as he swallows copper and gags.  His right side throbs, his breath coming in short, fiery gasps, and he retches weakly into the passenger side footwell.

 

When the door on that side opens, he hasn’t the strength to sit up straight, much less defend himself.

 

  
Good thing, then, that it’s Shahzar’s boy, blood-splattered and wild-eyed.

 

“Drive, Mister,” he orders, and Nate nods, or he thinks he does, putting his foot to the gas once more and feeling the truck shudder into motion.

 

Behind them, there’s an explosion that reverberates against the mountains around them.  Nate can feel the pressure juddering in his chest.  It feels like he’s breathing through broken glass.

 

One of Shahzar’s loaded trucks must’ve been hit, Nate thinks.  Then he’s squinting through the darkness, his one unbroken headlight bouncing wildly from feature to feature, like the entire mountain is under strobe lights.

  
It makes him dizzy—or maybe that’s the blood loss—and when the sounds of the firefight have faded to distant, thrumming drumbeats, he lets the truck drift to a stop and slumps back in his seat.

 

“Can you drive?” he asks in whispered Pashto.  He tries it again in English, just in case.

 

“Sure, Mister,” the boy answers readily, and Nate nods like a broken puppet, pushing himself across the center console with his left arm while the boy scrambles behind him into the driver’s seat.

 

“Where to?” the boy asks, and Nate asks, “Ghar Waale?”

 

“Sorry, Mister,” he answers, indicating that he doesn’t know the place.

 

“When we come to the next road, make a left,” he instructs with the last of his energy.  “There’s a village thirty minutes further.  There will be help there.”

 

“Sure, Mister,” the boy answers, craning his neck to see over the dash as he stretches his bare toes down toward the accelerator.

 

The last clear image Nate has is of the boy’s face, kohl-smeared and shining with sweat, a strange grin stretching his lips wide as he lets out an ululating cry, which follows Nate down into the black.

 

*****

 

The distant firefight sounds to Brad like snare drums far away, as if somewhere there’s a marching band standing still, drilling on a football field under stadium lights.  The occasional bass drum adds depth to the piece:  RPGs, Brad thinks.

 

He knows without question that Nate’s in trouble, and he clenches his fists against the need to go to his aid.  He has no idea where Nate had set for the arms deal, no concept of who he was meeting or what he’d expected except trouble.

 

Wherever Nate is, Brad can’t get there in time; night has been pulled like a blanket across the wadi, muffling them in starless darkness.  Knowing that doesn’t quell his need.

 

Having sheltered the women and children in the most protected of the mud-brick houses, the village men have built a fire near the well and gathered there.  Against the wall of the well, they’ve collected the village arsenal:  Two antique Lee Enfield rifles and a handful of bullets for each; one AK-47 bedazzled to within an inch of its functionality with cut-glass beads and pasted thread in intricate patterns, and two magazines, thankfully free of embellishments; and, strangely enough, a PKM that looks like it was just broken out of the packaging.

 

The man who’d contributed it, Kushan, had only shrugged sheepishly and muttered something that Turan had struggled to translate but that Brad figured for the Afghan equivalent of “It fell off the back of a truck.”

 

Since the PKM came with only one two-hundred-round box, it would have to be used sparingly, maybe for the illusion of superior firepower among the villagers.

 

There’s no illusion where Brad and his team are concerned.  He likes the chances of five highly trained soldiers armed with a .50, a SAW, four M-4s, two M203s, and a Carl Gustav recoilless rifle, not to mention RPGs and grenades, up against whatever might come down at them out of the hills.  Unless the insurgents here are significantly better armed and trained than the ones they’ve encountered in the past few days, Brad feels confident that he and his team will easily dominate the field of combat.

 

If the insurgents are a company rather than a team or a unit and are capable of accurate rifle and mortar fire, however, that’s a different story entirely.

 

Brad and the team had already discussed the best positions for cover and the likely places from which the enemy will engage them.  He’d kept Turan hopping asking questions of the men of the village about where the bad guys had been sighted before, which direction the men Turan had told him about, the ones who’d threatened Nate, had come from, and anything else they might have learned.

 

They’re as prepared as they’re going to be.

 

Brad’s scanning the ridgeline to the east of the village when some warrior sixth sense alerts him to a change in the air.  He listens, but it’s the absence of noise that asserts itself:  The firefight is over.  There are no more sounds coming from the unknown site of Nate’s meet.

 

Shaking off a growing dread that plants icy roots in his gut, Brad returns to surveying the mountainside with his night vision scope.

 

He knows that ranged around the village are the four members of the CTPT, likewise outfitted with night vision gear, and that they are doing the same, looking for the break in the dam that will signal a flood of opposition.

 

When it comes, though, it’s more like a trickle.   
  
The motion registers before Brad’s brain can process what he’s seeing:  A single gunman, walking upright and unhurriedly, down the steep ridgeline toward Brad’s position.

 

He wonders for a moment if the man is unaware of US night vision technology or if he’s somehow intoxicated, stoned on the local hashish, or merely out of his mind.

 

The confusion slows Brad down long enough to overlook the most obvious possibility, and before he can call out an order not to shoot, two guns open up, Arman’s big SAW rounds punching holes in the guy’s torso, halving him, while Nang’s rounds, striking low, walk up the ground toward the guy until they stitch open his left leg to the pelvis.

 

For a breathless moment it seems like that might be all, one guy with a martyr complex making his way to his heaven of virgins.

 

Then the mountainside erupts with muzzle flashes, all aimed at Arman’s and Nang’s position.

 

Shouts from the well suggest that the village men are taking cover, and the crack of a Lee Enfield tells Brad that at least one of the villagers has gone to work, but he can’t waste the time looking, zeroed in as he is on taking aim at the muzzle flashes.

 

He stops counting at twenty, adjusts his aim, steadies his breath, and then starts picking off the shooters with carefully targeted bursts.

 

Of course, that alerts the bad guys to his position, and suddenly the shoulder-high mud-brick wall he’d been using for cover is pelted with a hail of bullets that kick grit and shrapnel up into the night air, obscuring his scope and his aim.

 

Despite the number of opponents, Brad’s not especially worried; they’ve got the advantage of position in the walled village, plenty of cover, and superior firepower.

 

Then an RPG streaks out of the sky and rockets into the well wall, throwing fist-sized chunks of rock and debris and dropping anyone in a radius of fifty meters.

 

He hears a scream and spares a glance to find a middle-aged villager staggering out of the cover of the far side of the well.  He’s bleeding from the head and reeling as he walks, clearly concussed.

  
Brad screams, “Get down!” in crappy Pashto, but the man is gunned down before he has a chance to process Brad’s words.

 

Cursing, Brad watches the bedazzled AK-47 fall from the man’s lifeless hand.  Before he can return his attention to his own situation, he sees Turan crawling into the open to grab the stock of the rifle and yank it back under cover of the remaining portion of the well wall.

 

He’s just wondering what the fuck Samsoon is doing when the .50 opens its throat and barks out a series of guttural shots.  They’d parked the Humvee on the only road through the village, its nose facing back toward FB Shkin, its passenger side protected in part by the thick walls of Nate’s would-be medical clinic.  The gun has the best range of fire for the mountain to the east, which is where most of the village men had reported seeing bad guys and also seems to be the mountain from which the two men from the morning had come.

 

Now, Samsoon lays down raking fire, sweeping through the area where the greatest number of enemy muzzle flashes are concentrated.

 

The rate of return fire significantly diminishes, and Brad is starting to think that the bad guys have pulled back and given up when the wall against which he’s resting his arm is fractured by a bullet, the shrapnel stinging him sharply across the cheek, narrowly missing his eye.

 

Startled, he drops to a crouch and spins, back to the wall as he uses his rifle scope to scan the terrain behind him.  The west mountain had been dismissed as a less realistic avenue of attack; it’s steep-sided, unforgiving, and there is precious little cover for the enemy there.

 

Still, muzzle flashes from the incline overhead indicate that one bad guy, at least, has decided to flank the team.

 

Brad calls out to Arman, situated thirty meters to his left, shouting that he should watch his six and to spread the word.

 

More bullets strike the earth at Brad’s feet and the wall to either side of him, and he lunges forward, using elbows and toes to crawl into the relative cover of a doorway, out of the direct line of sight of the gunman on the west mountain.

 

He’s hardly had time to catch his breath when the wall where he’d just been is obliterated by an RPG.  He hears the shriek of the incoming round in just enough time to cover his face, then he’s showered in brick fragments, grit, and dust, shaking it from his arms and gun and spitting to get the shit out of his mouth.

 

“Fuck this,” he growls, scanning for Samsoon on the Humvee.  He sees the kid is taking fire from the rear, posits that there’s more than one gunman in a precarious perch on the west mountainside, and runs toward the vehicle, shouting, “Get out of the turret!  Get down!  Down!”

 

He hears the rocket before it strikes, watches in frozen horror as it hits the front driver’s side hood near the bumper, pressing the front end of the heavy vehicle earthward, the rear tires leaving the ground.

 

The hood flies up, torn half from its hinges by the force of the explosion, and rocket fragments, engine parts, and armor shrapnel are flung in a deadly arc, slicing the air where Samsoon had just been.

 

Brad’s knocked on his ass by the blast, disoriented, ears ringing, and he has to open his mouth to clear the concussion, the displacement of air making his lungs heavy.

 

He gets to his feet, knees watery, and stumbles toward the Humvee, which has settled again on its rear tires, its front blown.  It rests nose-down like a kneeling camel, the .50 swinging in a lazy arc, unmanned.

 

Brad makes it to the passenger side rear door and wrenches it open.  The back seat is a chaos of dirt and shrapnel, the top of the seat shredded, foam filling still sifting slowly onto the prone form of Samsoon, who’s laying at an awkward angle, head-down in the far foot-well, near leg canted at an unnatural angle, one bloody hand flung out as though still reaching for the .50’s trigger.

 

Brad assesses the kid with a careful hand, sure his neck is broken, but he feels a pulse beating strong under his finger, and as he slips his hand around to cradle Samsoon’s head, the kid’s eyelashes flutter and he opens them, confused and muzzy but awake.

 

“Hey,” Brad says—or maybe he shouts it, he can’t tell, his ears blown from the blast.  The kid flinches, but understanding clears his hazy eyes and he struggles to sit upright.  

 

“Easy,” Brad warns just as the kid realizes his left leg is broken and he winces with the sudden agony of it.

 

Brad eases an arm across the kid’s back and slides one hand high up under his left thigh, levering him carefully out of the vehicle and half-carrying him into Nate’s clinic, which is pitch-dark but relatively safe; the walls are thick on three sides and the rear wall is carved from the mountain itself.  Brad helps Samsoon to rest against the rear wall, flips on his flashlight, and does a cursory triage to inspect for hidden injuries.

 

The blood on his hand turns out to have come from a shallow gouge along his wrist; it’s already stopped bleeding.

 

No other injuries make themselves apparent, and by the end of the inspection, Samsoon is looking impatiently at Brad, shooing him toward the door with his good hand.

 

“No,” Brad says, eyeing the broken leg.  Grimly, he adds, “Have to splint that.”

 

With his flashlight, he finds a roll of medical bandage but not splints, so he improvises, kicking apart a metal V-brace intended for a wall shelf and using the two straight pieces as a splint.  

 

He grabs Samsoon’s boot at the ankle, braces a hand above his knee, and says, “This is going to hurt like a bitch,” just as he wrenches the bone straight, feeling the two halves of the clean break settle against one another.

 

To his credit, the kid doesn’t scream, only punches out a grunt, eyes rolling back a little in his head.  He’s sweating, teeth gritted against the agony, when Brad secures the splint.

 

Then the kid says, “Gun,” unmistakably a command, and Brad obliges, jogging out to the wrecked Humvee to rescue Samsoon’s M-4 from the ruined back seat.

 

At Samsoon’s insistence, Brad helps him up, and he hobbles to the south wall window, which has a narrow sightline of the near western ridge.  

 

“I will cover,” Samsoon says.  “Go.”

 

Brad goes.

 

He needs to get a better handle on the situation, see how many of the enemy are left on each side of the village and determine what the team needs in order to drive them back.

 

As he makes his way toward the well, he spots Turan crouched in the doorway of a house on the east side of the road.  With the hand not holding the bedazzled AK-47, he gestures for Brad to follow him into the dim interior, and Brad does, trying to watch where he puts his feet:  it’s someone’s home, after all.  Pillows and place-settings on the floor speak of a meal left unfinished.

 

Turan waves him to a window that looks out on the eastern mountain.  The kid’s good:  It’s an excellent vantage point, and Brad spends a long span of breaths looking through his night vision scope and assessing the enemy force.

 

The remaining fighters—looks like fifteen or so, in all—have gotten wise and spread themselves out across the broken terrain of the ridgeline.  The nearest are four hundred yards away, and they seem to be working in teams, one firing while the other covers him.  Despite the martyrdom that kicked this whole shindig off, these guys are well-trained and disciplined.  As he watches, a larger muzzle flash precedes the familiar whine of an incoming RPG, which strikes somewhere to Brad’s left, maybe fifty yards away.

 

There’s a shout outside the hut, but Brad ignores the commotion, using the scope of his rifle to zero in on the guy firing the grenades.  The bad guy is competent, professional, moving his position and keeping as much under cover as possible, but Brad catches a break when he has to dart from one boulder to the next, a distance of thirty or so feet.  Brad’s waiting for the chance, anticipating the guy, and he leads on the shot.

 

With satisfaction, he watches as the man drops out of sight, maybe hit, maybe just hitting the deck.  

 

A moment later, a second man appears in Brad’s scope, apparently intent on retrieving the grenade launcher.  He misses the chance when Brad drives him back with a well-aimed burst.  A second burst discourages the guy for the time being, and Brad waits another minute and then two before assuring himself that the guy on the ground is not getting up and his RPG-seeking buddy isn’t coming back.

 

His actions haven’t gone without notice, however, because as soon as he starts to search out another target, the window attracts a flurry of bullets, and Brad has to duck back inside, grateful for the thick mud walls of the hut that protect him from ordinary rounds.

 

If they have larger, armor-piercing rounds and the means to fire them, he’s shit out of luck, so he abides by his training and his instinct, nodding to Turan to precede him out of the hut and then guiding Turan by hand signals toward the shelter of the next hut on.  The kid’s a fast learner and cool under pressure; Brad thinks he’s going to be a hell of a soldier if he manages to grow up.

 

He stops in the doorway of the next hut and takes a second to assess the scene at the well.  Another villager is prone on the ground, unmoving, outstretched arm not a foot from the body of the first fallen Afghan.  The guy might still be alive, but Brad doesn’t have time to do triage.  The wounded will have to wait, and the dead don’t need his help.

 

Turan has ducked into the next hut and is standing in the gloom just to one side of the door.  Brad can only see his eyes, which pick up residual light from the dying fire near the well.

 

“They’re coming from both mountains,” Brad says, but by the way the boy nods his head, it’s clear he already knew that.  “We have the cover of houses, but they have the advantage of the high ground.”

 

“Fish in a barrel,” Turan says, and Brad gives him a look.  “Mister Kochai said so once.”

 

Of course Nate had done a thorough situational assessment.  Brad squelches a fierce finger of worry that worms itself out of the ice in his guts.  Nate can take care of himself.

 

“I need to get to Darab.”  The older Afghan is a crack shot, and Brad hopes to hook him up with a night scope and a rifle and set him to picking off the opposition on the west mountain.  “You know how to use that?” Brad indicates the kid’s recently acquired rifle with a tilt of his chin.

 

The boy shrugs, then nods, as if to say, _How hard can it be?_

 

Under other circumstances, he’d never consider endangering a boy of Turan’s age, but given the story Nate had shared about the boy’s past and the likelihood that this is Ghar Waale’s last stand if they don’t defeat the attacking insurgents, he can’t spend too much time worrying about it.

 

“Don’t take chances—just put it out the window and shoot.  Don’t reveal yourself.”  Brad makes a gesture that encompasses his face and shoulders.  “Keep this part inside.  Got it?”

 

Turan nods.

 

“When you run out of ammo, get down and stay down.  If they start firing on your position, get out.”

 

The boy nods again.

 

“Stay frosty,” he instructs, giving the boy a flash of teeth in the gloom.  The kid’s got more guts than some marines Brad knows.  He hopes he survives the night.

 

He’s crouched in the space between two huts, searching the darkness beyond the well fire to find the muzzle flashes of the rest of his team, when he hears a noise out of place in the sporadic, screaming chorus  of gunfire and grenade explosions.  It sounds like a truck engine laboring on the road to Ghar Waale, growing closer.

 

Brad has a wild moment of elation when he thinks it might be reinforcements, a team actually sent out when Brad failed to report in earlier that day.  But when he sees the shape of the single working headlight and the size of the truck, he realizes it’s a Hilux, and not Nate’s truck—too big, too new, too long in the bed.

  
It can only be more trouble, he considers, just as Samsoon opens up with his M-4 and the truck’s headlight blinks out.

 

Brad loses sight of it, though he can sense its presence, a behemoth dragging itself over the rutted earth of the road toward their position.

 

It keeps coming, twenty, maybe twenty-five miles an hour, and Brad doesn’t need to see Samsoon to know that the kid’s steadying his aim to rake across the windshield, to pummel the so-called “bullet-proof” glass until it gives up under the repeated beating and he has a shot at the occupants.

 

Brad’s already moving to provide Samsoon with support when the truck groans to a halt, engine sputtering out in the strange silence that marks a lull in gunfire.  Every firefight has those moments, as though both sides have taken a long, deep breath at the same time.  His grandmother used to say the angels were passing; Brad’s pretty sure that’s not where the phenomenon comes from where battle is concerned.

 

 

Whatever the case, the silence stretches, and he hears a high, thin voice say, “Please, we are friends.  Friends to the US.  Please.”

 

As if the bad guys on the east mountain have been broken from a reverie by the clear voice lilting out of the darkness, they open fire, presumably targeting the truck.

 

“Hold your fire,” he instructs Samsoon as he comes even with the near corner of the medical hut.  “They might be friendly.”

 

Samsoon makes a noise loud enough and eloquent enough to express his opinion of Brad’s conjecture, but he ignores it, moving past Samsoon to the far corner and peering toward the truck, which from here is only thirty feet away.

 

Using his scope, Brad makes out two passengers, one very short, the other slumped over, unconscious.

 

Though the Kevlar helmet obscures the man’s features, he’d recognize the set of the shoulders and the general build anywhere.

  
Even as the same voice is repeating its pathetic message—“Please, we are friends to America”—Brad is calling, “Cover me,” to Samsoon as he drops into a crouch and works his way toward Nate’s hut, the last cover he’ll have on that end of the village.

 

When he gets to his position, bullets spitting up dirt in the ground six feet behind him all the way, Brad uses his scope to make out the driver, who appears to be a boy maybe a little younger than Turan.

 

He resists the urge to linger on Nate and instead draws the scope away to say, “Can you pull him down so he’s facing me?”

 

The boy nods and begins the task of pulling Nate over so that he’s slumped across the front seat, his head practically in the boy’s lap.

 

“Okay, I’m coming to get you.  You first, then him.  Got it?”

 

The boy nods again and then flings open the door, sliding until his toes are just touching the running board.

 

Brad sprints as best he can in forty pounds of armor and gear, reaching out an arm for the boy and sweeping him into a carry.  The kid doesn’t weigh much more than Brad’s pack, and he’s back to Nate’s doorway in no time.  

 

“Inside the door, crouch down, keep your head down and your back to this wall, okay?”

 

Another nod.

 

Brad assesses the rate of gunfire, waits for the inevitable pause brought on by reloading, and once again crosses the distance, covering the twenty or so feet without hesitating.  He slings his gun over his shoulder and reaches toward Nate, grabbing him under the arms and hauling him across the seat, ducking and getting a shoulder under his middle as his weight brings him free of the truck.

 

There’s a hang-up when Nate’s boot gets tangled in the steering wheel, but Brad yanks him, wincing internally at the damage he might be causing, hoping to god Nate doesn’t have a spinal injury.

 

Nate’s dead weight against his chest and back as he hauls him in a fireman’s carry toward the relative safety of his hut.

 

When he gets inside, he puts Nate down as gently as he can on the bed he’d left Nate in only two days before and says to the boy, “Do you know where he’s hit?”

 

The boy nods.

 

If Brad hadn’t heard him speak earlier, he’d think the kid’s tongue had been cut out.  That would certainly gel with the nipple piercings, smeared kohl, and see-through harem pants.  

 

“Where?”  He barks, urgency growing in him at Nate’s stillness and the way the green light of the night vision scope leaches all color from his skin.

 

The boy crosses the doorway in a crouch and comes to kneel beside Brad, taking his hand and guiding it to Nate’s right side, up under his arm, where Brad feels the telltale cloying stickiness of blood.

 

“Shit.  Okay…okay.”  He takes a deep breath and reaches for the field kit he always keeps strapped to the front of his vest.  It’s basic, but it has pressure bandages and three packets of QuikClot.  The irony doesn’t escape him that only a few huts—and several hundred rounds—away, there are medical supplies piled in Nate’s medical clinic, nor that the person probably best qualified to help Nate is himself the one in need of aid.

 

Brad puts his fear away and focuses on the task at hand.  He’s going to have to risk a light, and he pulls a powerful mini-Mag from his vest pocket, handing it to the boy.

 

“Sit here,” he instructs the boy, pulling the boy closer to his left side and angling him over Nate’s prone form. “Hold this, just like this.” Brad models for the boy how to hold the light so that it shines only on Nate and so that his and Brad’s bodies block the light as much as possible from shining through the hut’s windows.

 

Movement to his nine brings Brad out of his crouch, gun already back in his hands, until he recognizes Samsoon in the uncertain aureole cast by the light.

 

“Cover,” he offers, hobbling awkwardly to the window that faces south toward the road into Ghar Waale.

 

“Thank you,” Brad responds, relieved to have the fire support and a little amazed that Samsoon had made it the distance.

 

He sets about stripping Nate as efficiently as he can, ignoring the minute tremors in his hands and the wicked sucking sound the material of Nate’s tee-shirt makes as he peels it away from his skin.

 

From what he can make out in the narrow beam of the Maglite, Nate had been shot under the right arm, the bullet entering just above the edge of his vest and angling downward to exit out his back on the same side, just below the last rib.  

 

Brad listens to Nate’s breathing, trying to shut out the sounds of the firefight, trying to hear if Nate’s in distress, if he’s got a collapsed lung, if he’s drowning in his own blood.  He watches the rise and fall of Nate’s chest—shallow, rapid movements—and knows there’s some damage, but there’s no blood on his lips or in his mouth that Brad can see, and he hopes that means that his lungs are intact.  A careful inspect of his ribs suggests at least one fracture, maybe more.  That might explain the shallow breathing; broken ribs hurt like a motherfucker.

 

Brad’s no medic, but he’s seen enough violence enacted on the human body to know when death is close.  Nate’s unconscious and he may be in shock—his skin is cool to the touch and ghostly pale in the punishing, focused beam of the Maglite—but when Brad peels his eyelids up, his pupils respond to the light, which gives him hope that Nate isn’t out of the fight for his own life.

 

There’s no mottling of the skin on his abdomen, so Brad doesn’t think there’s blood pooling there; maybe the bullet took a hard right before it could nick anything important.

 

The entrance wound isn’t bleeding much, but the exit wound, about the size of a quarter, bleeds sluggishly.  Brad tears open a packet of QuikClot with his teeth, sterile conditions impossible under the circumstances, and pours the clotting agent into the wound slowly.  It starts to congeal after a few seconds, and Brad watches to see if the wound needs another packet.  Satisfied that he’s slowed the bleeding, he packs the wound with gauze and then gets out a pressure bandage.

 

  
“Give me the light,” he orders the boy, who obeys immediately.  “Hold this, just like this.” Again, Brad shows the boy what he needs.  “Keep the pressure on.”

 

The boy complies without a murmur, hands steady, eyes on his task.

 

Brad marvels again at how Afghani kids seem to have immense reserves of strength.

 

“I’m sending Darab your way,” he calls to Samsoon, who takes a hand from his gun only long enough to acknowledge Brad’s statement.  

 

He’s at the door, peering outside in preparation for a sprint across the open street to the shelter of the huts on the far side, when he hears a stirring from the mattress and turns to find Nate struggling under the boy’s hands.

 

Brad’s on his knees beside Nate in a moment, grabbing Nate’s hands and saying, “Hey, it’s alright.  It’s me.  You’re safe.  You’re fine.”

 

Nate narrows his eyes at Brad, which tells Brad all he needs to know about Nate’s mental state:  Namely, he’s awake, aware, and doesn’t appreciate being patronized.

 

“Fine.  You’ve got a couple of holes in you and at least one broken rib, but I’ve got the worst of the bleeding stopped, and I don’t think your lungs are compromised.”

 

Nate nods a little brokenly, winces, and tries to speak but shakes his head.  Cautious of giving him water, Brad nonetheless knows what it’s like to wake up with your tongue stuck to the back of your teeth, so he dribbles a little into Nate’s mouth.

 

“Thanks,” Nate manages in a hoarse whisper that Brad has to lean over him to hear.  “Report?”

 

There’s the same command in his tone now, on his back, bleeding into his mattress, strange kid holding his blood in, as he’d had under fire near an Iraqi bridge, and Brad’s reminded once again of how much he admires Nate.

 

“We’ve got at least two bad guys positioned up on the ridge on the west mountain and about fifteen or so to the east.  It’s accurate fire.  Our Humvee’s toast, but I think the .50 still works, it’s just too dangerous to put someone in the turret.  Samsoon’s watching your position,” he adds, nodding toward the young man, who’s leaning against the edge of the window and scanning the dark with his night vision scope.

 

“I’ve got three more in the village and a couple of village volunteers.  I’m going to send Darab to you with a rifle to try to take out the guys to the west.  The rest of our firepower will be concentrated on the eastern flank.  I’m going to put the Carl G to work.  Oh,” he adds as an afterthought, “If you hear a PKM close in, don’t worry.  It’s ours.”  

 

He shrugs at Nate’s questioning look.  “Long story.”

 

Nate nods.  “Give me a gun,” he says, working himself up onto his elbows.  What little color he’d regained with consciousness washes out of him at the motion, and Brad lays a careful hand on his left shoulder to push him back against the mattress.  

 

“No way.  You’re combat ineffective, and I can’t be worried about you.  Samsoon’s got a broken leg, and the kid here isn’t trained.”

 

  
At Brad’s last observation, Nate snorts.  “Give _him_ a gun,” he suggests then, indicating the boy and seemingly accepting Brad’s admonition.  But Brad’s known Nate a long time, and he’s not fooled.

 

 

“What, so you can take it from him when I leave?  No.  The kid’s safer if he’s unarmed.  If we lose, and they come in, they might not kill him if he seems like a noncombatant.”

 

Nate levels Brad with a scathing look.  “Seem to you like he’s going to come away from this unscathed?”  His gaze clearly indicates all the evidence apparent on the boy’s body that whatever purpose the bad guys would have for the kid, a bullet to the head would probably be more merciful.

 

“Yeah, okay,” Brad concedes, pulling his pistol from its holster and handing it to the boy, who takes his hands away from Nate’s wound only after looking to Nate for permission.

 

As Nate watches the kid handle the gun, Brad slips a morphine syrette from the med kit, and before Nate can notice his motion, he’s stuck it in Nate’s left bicep and is pushing the plunger home.

 

“You son of a bitch,” Nate says, but there’s no force behind it.  He’s injured and exhausted, his skin still cool and pale, and Brad feels only a little guilt as he watches Nate’s eyes glaze over and his eyelids begin to droop.

 

“I love you, too,” he says, only half in jest, starting to rise and get back to work.  A hand on his wrist stops him on one knee, and he turns his eyes on Nate’s face to find his gaze clear enough, though Nate’s obviously fighting for that clarity.

 

“I do.  Love you,” Nate returns, words a little slurred but tone definite.  He’s not out of his gourd on the morphine yet.  

 

Brad couldn’t care less that they have an audience when he takes both knees once more and leans over Nate to kiss him gently on the lips, a close-mouthed, chaste kiss that’s nevertheless absolutely clear in its meaning.  Against Nate’s lips, Brad says, “Don’t die,” and then he deepens the kiss long enough to stroke Nate’s lips with his tongue before pulling back.

 

Nate’s already asleep when Brad straightens up and stands.

 

“You watch him,” he orders the boy, who has set aside the gun to check the pressure bandage on Nate’s exit wound.

 

“I will, Mister,” the boy says in clear English.  

 

“Don’t shoot Darab,” Brad adds, and the boy shrugs in acknowledgment and returns to his nursing.

 

The two-hundred-yard trip to Darab’s position is fairly uneventful for a recon marine.  Yeah, he has to dodge bullets, and once he’s flung flat on his face by the concussive force of a rocket-propelled grenade striking a hut wall about thirty yards behind him, but otherwise, it’s a cake walk.

 

Darab is stationed at the northernmost point in town, tucked behind the rear wall of a hut on the west side of the street.  He’s taking carefully aimed shots at the insurgents on the mountainside, of whom there are still about a dozen left.

 

“More have come,” Darab offers in heavily accented English.

 

“I need you to the west at the south end of the village.  Last hut on the right,” Brad says, indicating with his hand the direction he wants Darab to travel.  “Take the M-4,” he says, trading guns with Darab, happy enough to have the SAW, though he’s always been a sniper at heart.  “I count two bad guys on the western ridge. I need you to take them out.”

 

Darab nods and prepares to do as he’s been commanded.  Brad stops him with a hand on his arm.

 

“Samsoon’s been hurt, but he’s okay.  He’s covering the south window.  The man from before, the man we stopped to talk to on the road?  He’s there.  He’s been shot.  There’s a boy, too, taking care of him.”

 

He says it all in slow English, sprinkling in Pashto words—he doesn’t have enough Dari for the job—where he thinks it will help rather than hinder Darab’s understanding.

 

  
The man nods solemnly, pats Brad on the shoulder, and says, “We win,” as though there is no other option.

 

 

Then he’s gone, disappearing into the dark as though he was never there in the first place.  Fucking Afghani ninja, Brad thinks admiringly, and then he moves away himself, a little concerned about leaving the northern flank unguarded, given the proximity of the house where they’ve hidden the women and children, but unable to worry about it now.

 

He’ll make do.

 

In the time he’s been occupied in Nate’s hut, a fat, almost-full moon has risen, bathing the wadi in a thin, blue light.  On the one hand, it makes it easier for Brad to gather the men and plan a counter-attack.

 

On the other, it means the enemy can see them clearly without benefit of night vision gear, effectively removing one of the few advantages Brad and his team had had.

 

Accepting that there’s nothing he can do to change the moon, Brad calls Arman and Nang into a huddle to go over instructions.  Given that they speak less English than Darab and that neither Samsoon nor Turan is available for translating, it’s a conversation largely made up of hand signs, but he thinks the men get his point well enough.

 

They need to concentrate their fire on a show of force to drive back the bad guys entrenched in superior positions and to discourage their leader from committing more insurgents to the fight.  Three Coalition-trained fighters against a dozen bad guys wouldn’t ordinarily be much of a fight, but this enemy is sophisticated, disciplined, and well-equipped.

 

Without the superiority that air support usually provides their side, Brad knows that the enemy could simply wait them out until they’ve spent all their ammo. 

 

So after his “talk” with Arman and Nang, Brad fetches Turan and then seeks out Kushan with his PKM, and also recruits a sour-faced, thirty-something guy with a well-maintained Lee Enfield whose name, according to Kushan, is Jaran.  The man himself never speaks to Brad.

 

“You know how to use that?” he asks Kushan by way of Turan.  Kushan smirks nervously and makes an indefinite motion with his shoulders. 

 

“If you can’t use it, I’ll find someone who can,” Brad says, giving the man the chance to save face.

  
“He says he can fire it,” Turan answers after a lengthy exchange.  “But he cannot promise to hit anyone.”

 

“That’s good enough,” Brad answers, turning to Jaran.  “You any good with that?”

 

Turan answers for Jaran without even consulting the man.  “Best hunter in the village.”

 

“Okay, then, here’s what we’re going to do.”

 

Turan has his work cut out for him in translating, but when they’re done, Brad feels like they’ve got a fighting chance.

 

He and Nang risk their necks to retrieve what ammunition they can from the wrecked Humvee, Darab providing deadly cover fire for them, and then they’re back at the heart of the village, spread out along the wall on the eastern side of the village.

 

Brad had given his SAW to Nang in favor of the Carl Gustav, for which he has a half-dozen HEDP rounds and a dozen fragmentary rounds that should do the trick.  He takes aim behind the big scope and steadies the recoilless rifle on its bipod.

 

He nods to Arman, who’s next down the line to Brad’s left, and Arman opens fire, a general, sweeping curtain of death intended to draw out the enemy.

  
It works, muzzle flashes lighting up the eastern mountainside like the world’s deadliest fireflies.

 

Target acquired, Brad focuses on the nearest two-man team embedded behind a boulder the size of an overturned refrigerator and fires an HEDP into the boulder.  The ensuing concussion and dust-cloud are impressive indicators of the round’s effectiveness, and as the dust settles, he sees one man down and the other scuttling away on his hands and one knee, the other leg dragging uselessly behind him.

 

As planned, Jaran does clean-up with his Lee Enfield, the precise crack of the weapon almost nostalgic after the staccato racket of the M-4s and SAW.

 

Brad’s tactic works on a second enemy position before the enemy gets wise and concentrates their fire on Brad’s position.

  
He’s crouched behind a mud-brick wall when he hears the RPG coming in, and he knows it’s going to land on his side of the cover.  He flings himself toward the back wall of the nearest hut, face against the brick and arms over his head and neck.

 

The explosion roars over him, buffeting him against the wall, debris and shrapnel pelting his back.

  
He feels a hot, sharp agony to his left calf, and after the dust settles a little, he finds a six-inch gash in the material of his pants, edges of the fabric already saturated with blood.

 

“I’m good,” he calls to Nang, and pulls himself around the south side of the hut to open the tear on his pants wider and assess the damage.  There’s a two-inch piece of grenade shrapnel embedded in his calf.  He pulls it free and slaps a bandage over it, wraps it tight with gauze, and stands, testing his footing.

  
He’s fine.

 

Down the line, he sees that Nang has signaled to Kushan to open up on the PKM.  The man nods like he understands but fails to act, frozen behind the gun sight, right hand falling from the trigger.  

 

“Fire!” Brad shouts in Pashto.  Still, Kushan does nothing.

 

Disgusted, Nang wrenches the big gun from the man and shoves him backward to land on his ass in the dirt.  Kushan crab-walks toward the ruins of the well wall and cowers there, blubbering.

  
Then Atal appears, moving swiftly for a man of his age, seemingly unfazed by the bullets striking the ground around him.  He takes the PKM from Nang and props it against the wall, settling himself behind it as though he’s spent his life training on the gun.

 

Brad leaves them to it, shifting his attention to the Carl G to determine if it sustained any damage in the RPG attack.  Finding it dusty but functional, Brad moves to a position thirty feet north of where he had been and sets up to wait for his next turn to fire.

 

Atal and Nang lay down withering fire concentrated on an enemy position almost directly west of their own.  Evenly matched and under more or less equal cover, this amounts to a useless exchange, but it gives Brad time to aim the Carl G and send another punishing bunker-buster into the boxcar-sized rock behind which the enemy team is hiding.

 

This time, there are no mobile wounded for Jaran to pick off, and Brad’s pleased to see that they’ve reduced the enemy to three teams, a maximum of nine guys, assuming their leader doesn’t send in reinforcements.

Time has no meaning in a firefight.  Dawn could be just around the corner or hours away for all Brad knows.  Life narrows to the scope of the Carl G, the impact of the rounds, the accuracy of return fire.

 

It seems that the enemy has sent in reinforcements because despite taking out two more enemy positions, the total number remains stubbornly fixed at three teams.  He spares a thought for Darab and Samsoon, hoping they’ve had no increase in enemy activity on their end of town, and then loads an incendiary round for the next target.

  
This team is hidden behind a fold in the hill where some ancient geological cataclysm had thrust up an impenetrable ridge of rock, perhaps twelve feet in height, which provides cover even a bunker-buster can’t destroy.

 

Instead, Brad intends to fire a round that will explode in the air over the enemy position, showering them in chemical fire.  It’s a particularly gruesome and lethally effective weapon.

 

He sights carefully, waiting for the muzzles to appear at the top of the ridge, indicating that the enemy is prone against the earth, and then fires the round.

 

It does exactly as it should, sailing in a dizzying arc, hanging as if by magic twenty feet above the enemy position, and exploding in a shower of fire.

 

The stunned silence that follows attests to the awesome effect of the weapon, even the enemy waiting to see what will happen.

 

A scream, faint but clear, pierces the strange quiet, and one of the enemy, lit up like a living flame, staggers to the crest of the ridge and topples, plunging the twelve feet to the exposed side and lying still except for the devouring fire that eats at his bones.

 

As if the man’s acted as a signal flare, the enemy launches a desperate final assault, the remaining two teams—and several individual fighters who’d apparently been holding themselves in reserve—abandon cover to career down the mountainside and gain the flat on the far side of the stream, which is deep and relatively slow at the point where a footbridge transects it.

 

The bad guys aren’t foolish enough to line up for the slaughter, however, instead taking to the icy water and crossing with their guns over their heads.

 

They lay of the land hides the crossing from Brad’s sight, and he calls to the others to see if they have visual on the enemy.

 

A chorus of _No’s_ in two languages confirms what he’d expected, and Brad sets the Carl G aside in favor of an M-4 he’d left near the well for back-up.

 

The air is tight with the tension waiting brings, and Brad’s expecting any moment to be confronted with close contact.  They’re all startled when they hear the first scream from what is clearly a woman or a child.  Gunfire follows the desperate sound, and Brad hears the bone-chilling shriek of a mother who’s just seen her children slaughtered.

 

Atal stands without regard for his danger, and Turan bursts from the cover of a nearby hut, joining his grandfather to race up the street, hugging the huts on the west side but heedless of enemy fire, which pelts into the walls and ground around them.

 

 

Jaran follows after a contemptuous kick at Kushan, who remains huddled by the well, tears and snot tracking down his face.

 

Brad cannot abandon his position, no matter how he feels about the murder of defenseless women and children.  Only he, Nang, and Arman hold the eastern line, and Brad’s sure there will be an assault.

 

No sooner has he thought it than eight of the enemy burst from the scrub between the river and the village wall, moving fast and expertly, making of themselves almost impossible targets.

  
Brad zeroes in on one man, leads him, and gets him in the upper shoulder, throwing him backwards in an acrobatic arc.  He gets up, but Brad’s already moved on to another man, who has closed the distance between them to twenty yards.  This one he plugs in the belly, and the man cries out and lies prone, flailing weakly against the earth with one hand, the other clutching uselessly at his spilling guts.

 

The first insurgent is back on his feet, and Brad returns his attention there, breathing out over the shot and plowing the man in the breastbone.  This time when he falls, he does not get back up.

 

Nang opens up at last with the SAW, raking the remaining enemy with withering fire.  Brad’s about to join in when he hears the staccato reports of gunfire from the south end of town.  His focus wavers as he fights the urge to abandon his post and hurry to provide support for Darab and Samsoon.

 

Nang and Arman seem to have the situation under control.  The remaining fighters—three, Brad thinks—have taken cover behind a rusted-out Russian tractor that sits thirty feet east of the village wall.

 

He’s tempted to give Arman the Carl G and let him blow the shit out of their cover, but logically, Brad’s the best man for the job, Arman having used it for the first time only the other day at the water plant.

 

Every instinct he has tells him to go to Nate, but Brad knows that’s a fool’s errand.  He has to trust the others to protect Nate and stay here to do his own job.

 

With Nang keeping the enemy pinned behind the tractor, Brad loads a HEDP round and aims it at the tractor.  It homes in on the target with its usual brutal precision, and soon there are three dead men in the center of a ring of jagged tractor debris.

 

Free now to go to Nate, he’s not comforted at all by the oppressive silence that greets him as he darts from hut wall to hut wall on the west side of the village street, and he’s steeling himself to witness the worst when he calls out a quiet, “Nate, Samsoon, Darab, it’s Colbert,” with his back to the wall beside the door to Nate’s hut.

 

Nothing.

 

He ducks low and throws himself sideways into the room, his bad leg twinging at the treatment, his shoulder protesting, too, but the interior is obscured by a dust cloud illuminated by moonlight brought in through the new hole in the south wall.

 

The window opening has been widened by a grenade, maybe six inches of the surrounding wall having caved in on Samsoon, who’s stirring to consciousness beneath the pile.

 

Brad sweeps his gun left toward Nate’s bed and at first cannot make sense of what he’s seeing.

 

Then the dust settles a little and he sees the boy slumped over Nate’s still form.

 

He wants nothing more than to rush to Nate’s side, but Samsoon has the priority, since he’s clearly conscious and obviously struggling to get back in the fight.

 

  
Brad helps him up and says, “You okay?” 

 

 

Samsoon nods.

 

  
“Darab?”

 

Samsoon gestures toward the western mountain.  A report echoes from that direction, indicating that either Darab has driven the last of the snipers to ground or he himself is dead.

 

Samsoon waves Brad toward the bed, and he needs no further encouragement to drop to his knees and put his fingers first to the boy’s neck, a touch that rouses him.

 

He pulls back, gun in one hand, and aims it at Brad, eyes wild and unseeing.

  
“Woah, woah,” Brad says, hands up in the universal gesture of conciliation.

 

Samsoon adds some words in Pashto that seem to bring the boy back to himself.

 

At last, Brad can put his hands on Nate’s neck, where he’s thrilled to discover a steady pulse.  Suddenly breathless, Brad allows himself a moment to rest his hand beside Nate’s head on the mattress and lean over him to drink in his face.

 

He’s sleeping peacefully, eyes moving beneath his eyelids, and Brad almost wishes he believed in a god, if only to thank him, her, or it for giving Brad this gift:  Nate whole and alive, safe and more or less sound.

 

He almost hates to wake him, though he loves the way he does it, caressing Nate’s cheek and breathing quiet words in his ear until he stirs and comes awake with a groan that indicates pain but that Brad’s cock insists is just the opposite.

 

He has to swallow around a choking joy to see Nate’s eyes open, and then he’s saying, “I need your SAT freak and code.  We’ve got casualties.”

  
Nate, of course, and Samsoon are his immediate concern, but he’s sure there are women and children who will also need to be evacuated.

 

Nate waggles his fingers to indicate that Brad should bring him the SAT phone, which he unearths from the hiding place beside the fireplace, a feat that requires some effort, given that part of the wall has fallen on that corner.

 

“What’s your name?” he asks the kid as Nate calls in the order for a chopper.

 

“They call me ‘Sherin’.”

 

Brad doesn’t want to know who “They” are. 

 

“What does your mother call you?”

 

“She called me ‘Darwesh.’”

 

Brad doesn’t miss the way the boy uses the past tense.  “Well, Darwesh, you’re quite a hero now, you know.  Nate there is a pretty important guy, and you saved him.  I think we’ll be able to find you a home.  First, though, let’s find you some pants and get that stuff off your face.  Sound good?”

 

The kid seems confused by some of Brad’s words, but his tone is friendly, and Brad throws in a few illuminating gestures.  He leaves Darwesh with Nate, who’s still talking into the phone, and goes to track down the rest of his team.  Darab has not returned from his mission on the mountain.

 

He finds Nang and Arman at the well with Kushan, who has finally made it to his feet, though he sways as though drunk and can’t seem to speak clearly.  They’ve moved the two dead village men to a place side by side near the east wall and covered them respectfully.  But the real site of activity is the hut where the women and children had been hiding, and Brad reluctantly turns toward it, not wanting to see what he knows he will find when he gets there.

 

Atal is the first to greet him, tears caught in the deep valleys of his ancient face, and Brad fears the worst.

  
The old man gestures mutely toward the hut, outside of which are women wailing and tearing at their hair and grim-faced men clustered shoulder to shoulder, muttering and shaking their bearded heads over the corpse of an insurgent, who’s lying face-down in the dirt.

 

Brad sees Turan slumped against the hut wall to one side of the doorway, a wide swath of blood against the mud-bricks marking his fall.

 

Fingers to his carotid affirm what Brad can already tell:  Turan is dead.

 

Inside the hut there are two dead women and three murdered children, two girls and a boy.  One living man sways in anguished silence, hands clenching and unclenching as though he could pull the life back into his beloved dead.

 

Brad will not discover until later that the man is Liwal and that among the dead are his son, Roshan; his daughter, Laila; and his wife, Aghala.

 

The other little girl is Lema, Turan’s cousin, and the other dead woman Saba, Kushan’s sister.

 

He makes his slow, sad way back out through the grieving crowd and pauses at the well, where Jaran stands with his rifle at rest across his forearm.

 

“Thank you,” he says.  “That was good shooting.”

 

Turan is no longer there to translate, but the grim-faced man seems to understand Brad’s intent and bows his head once in acknowledgement.

 

He finds Atal there, too, talking to a one-eyed old man, and he lets him know that there will be a helicopter coming soon for the wounded.  Mostly, he gestures to the sky and rotates his finger, and they nod, Atal automatically, the one-eyed man with more understanding.

 

“Have you any wounded?” he asks.  “Injured?”  He pantomimes pain in his leg and then clutches his head and sees a light bulb go on in the one-eyed man’s expression.

 

“No, no,” he says, shaking his finger.  “No.”

 

He’ll send one of the team to do an assessment, regardless.  Might as well make use of Nate’s resources while they have them.

 

Nang and Arman have finished a patrol of the perimeter and meet him halfway back to Nate’s hut, where they find Darab helping his son sit on a crate of ammunition they’ve pulled from the Humvee.

 

“All dead,” Darab reports as Brad approaches.  Brad says, “Good day?” and the man grins his pirate grin.  “Good day,” he answers.

 

Inside, he finds that someone has recovered an oil lamp from the debris, and Darwesh is cleaning Nate’s exit wound with alcohol and a gauze pad.  The bleeding seems to have stopped, but the area around the wound is an angry red, and Brad fears infection.

 

Nate’s eyes are clear, though, and his skin has at last regained both color and warmth.  Brad can’t detect fever when he lays a hand across Nate’s brow, a motion Nate tolerates for only a few moments before he says, “Report?”

 

Darwesh leaves them without a word, simply handing Brad a new pressure bandage and then gliding away, bangles tinkling.

 

“He’s quite the little helper,” Brad notes, just to be saying something.  He doesn’t know how to tell Nate that Turan is dead.

 

“He is.  I told him I’d take him back on the chopper with me; we can get him in at one of the aid organizations.  He’s originally from Kandahar, but his family there are all dead.  He thinks he has an aunt in Peshawar.”  Nate pauses to acknowledge that Brad’s stalling and says again, more pointedly, “Report.”

 

Brad meets Nate’s eyes and he knows what Nate sees there, feels it in the way Nate’s breath catches in his chest and in the tension in his hand where he’s been touching Brad’s wrist while Brad applies fresh bandages to his wounds.

 

Despite the silent communication, Brad knows he has to say words aloud:  “Turan’s dead.”

 

“How?” Nate asks, voice hoarse, eyes wet with unshed tears.

 

“In the last assault a bad guy snuck into the north end of the village and opened fire in the hut where the women and children were hiding.  Turan and Atal went to stop him.”

 

Nate’s eyes close against the knowledge and he shakes his head.  Brad knows before he says them what words Nate’s about to say.

 

  
“It’s my fault.  I brought this down on them.  They’re dead because of me.”

 

Brad shakes his head.  “No.  I pulled Darab off his position at the north end of the village to take care of the guys on the west mountain.  I made the decision to leave that position undefended.  If it’s anyone’s responsibility, it’s mine.”

 

“Bullshit,” Nate growls, anger making his face and neck flush.

 

“Easy,” Brad warns, putting a hand on Nate’s collarbone and stroking over the pulse jumping in his neck.

 

“Who else?”  Nate demands, and Brad wishes he could sneak him another syrette of morphine.  But the chopper on its way isn’t US military or Coalition, and he doesn’t know if they’ll need Nate awake in order to get him, Samsoon, and Darwesh aboard.

 

Brad doesn’t know the names of the dead, but he describes what he saw, which leads to Nate ordering Brad to bring one of the village men to him or to carry Nate to them.

 

Brad’s saved the trouble when Atal himself appears in the doorway.

 

Nate tries to sit up, but Brad prevents that, so from his back, Nate makes a gesture of submission and begins to offer his condolences and apologies in careful Pashto.

 

The first Atal accepts with grace; the second he waves away with sharp words.

 

“He says it is not your fault, Mister,” Darwesh offers from the doorway, where he’s hovering uncertainly.  “He says bad men would have come even without you.  Turan died bravely defending his people. He killed his enemy.  Vengeance is holy when it is righteous.”

 

Brad can see the effort it costs Nate to school his features into polite acceptance of Atal’s words; he knows that Nate hasn’t truly accepted anything except responsibility for Turan’s death.

 

Atal lowers himself to sit beside Nate’s bed and slowly names the dead of the village, starting with the men at the well and moving to the women and children in the hut.  Darwesh translates carefully, sometimes deferring to Nate about the right word in English. Watching Atal watch the boy offers new pain.  Nate seems to see the same thing, for he uses one of Darwesh’s stumbles to break in with a question about the survivors.

 

When it’s established that no one in the village requires medical care, a fact reiterated by Nang, who appears momentarily in the doorway to tell Brad the same, Atal rises with Darwesh’s help and bows over Nate, wishing him swift healing and a cessation of pain before leaving to see to the needs of the diminished population of Ghar Waale.

 

*****

 

Nate can feel the pain starting to blur his thoughts and drag him under, but there’s something he needs to tell Brad first, something important that cannot wait.  

 

As Brad settles himself once more on his knees beside Nate, Nate reaches across his chest with his left hand, which Brad takes readily.  His other hand, he presses to Nate’s forehead again, as if Nate were a small child who might be running a temperature.

 

“I’ve got a fever,” he says, pre-empting Brad’s next words.  “They’ll give me antibiotics on the chopper.  I’ll be fine.”

 

Brad squeezes his hand and settles onto his heels.

 

“What I said before, it wasn’t the morphine talking.  I love you.  I have for a long time...since before the paddle party.  Since almost the first time I met you. Whatever happens, I promise this isn’t the end of things for us.  It may take a while, but I’ll find a way that we can be together.”  

 

Nate falters, searching Brad’s face, which is wearing that carefully impassive expression Brad gets when he’s listening to orders from superiors he dislikes.

 

Nate feels his heart sink in his chest and all the air leaves him in a painful gust.  His ribs twinge in protest and he tries to swallow a sigh of pain.

 

He’s only partially successful, judging by the way Brad eases the grip on his hand and strokes his thumb over the back of it.

 

“I’m sorry,” Nate starts, but Brad interrupts him, “Nothing to be sorry for.”

 

Nate plows on.  “I’m sorry for assuming that this is what you want.  Maybe you weren’t thinking about long-term, or maybe—.”

 

“There you go again, being deeply stupid for a college-educated man.”

 

Nate smiles, feeling suddenly giddy, afraid he might break out into hysterical laughter.  He’s not sure if that’s love or the fever, but in either case, he figures circumspection is the better part of not making a total fool of himself.

 

  
Besides, laughter would hurt like a bitch.

 

“That mean you’ll come back to me?”  He holds his breath, feeling his heart protesting against his ribs, pain radiating outward in growing concentric circles.

 

“Always,” Brad promises, leaning down to kiss him.

 

It’s earnest and gentle and somehow demanding and unrelenting at the same time, and Nate knows it’s love this time when he grows dizzy with the feeling of it.

 

“I’ll wait,” Nate answers when he can at last form words again.

 

“I know,” Brad avers, touching Nate’s cheek with his free hand, tracing Nate’s lips, the hollow of his throat, his unwounded shoulder, the skin of his wrist.

 

Nate’s about to ask Brad what he thinks will happen to him once he and the team return to FB Shkin, but he’s distracted by the distinctive, heavy thrumming of a helicopter approaching with some speed.

 

 

Brad lets go of Nate’s hand and rises reluctantly.  “I had Nang mark an LZ on the flat near the stream at the south end, but I’d better go out there and make sure your guys don’t shoot my guys thinking they’re insurgents.”

 

Nate nods.  “Tell the first man who gets off the chopper, ‘Nick sends his regards.’”

 

Brad smirks and shakes his head at the spy shit.  “When do I get to say, ‘The Eagle has landed’?”

 

“Shut up,” Nate answers fondly, trying not to laugh.  The pain has almost overcome his reserve, and he wills Brad to leave so he can relax into it and let it roll him under.

 

Just before he slips into the grey water of unconsciousness, Nate thinks of Turan, the way his face would light up when Nate would talk of America, of his courage and his kindness, his generous spirit and playful nature.  He wishes he could still pray, still believed in something beyond this hard and often ugly world.

 

Then he succumbs to the sucking darkness and knows the only peace this world offers.

 

*****

 

The man from the chopper is wearing a field suit so nondescript he could be from any army in the world.  He speaks in short, clipped phrases, using as few syllables as possible, and once he’s accepted Brad’s coded greeting and been pointed in the direction of Nate’s location, Brad’s dismissed with a few cursory words that are as much threat as thanks.  

 

It amounts to didn’t see anything, don’t know anything, weren’t there.  Don’t call us, we’ll call you.  Et cetera.

 

Brad can live with that.

 

A few minutes later, Nate’s been loaded onto the chopper by two stone-faced medics, and from just beyond the rotor wash Brad can make out the medics setting up IV drips and examining his wounds.  His misgivings about the cloak-and-dagger nature of Nate’s rescue start to fade when he sees the first guy he spoke to ushering Darwesh toward the chopper.  Someone has found him a pair of baggy trousers three sizes too big and a tunic that looks like it’s an hour away from returning to the sheep from which it was originally gotten, but at least he’s not in see-through harem pants anymore.

 

The boy himself seems to have washed the kohl from his eyes, and as he nears, Brad can see in the growing grey light of dawn that he’s also removed the gold hoops from his nipples, which had to hurt like a son of a bitch.  He can tell by the cautious hope in the boy’s gaze that the kid might be okay, assuming Nate’s contacts don’t turn out to be total bastards.

 

Finally, another guy from the flight crew jumps out to help Darab and Brad load Samsoon on.

 

Then everyone’s back in and the skids are starting to stutter up from the earth, and Brad can’t see a fucking thing through the dust-storm kicked up by the rotors, but he waves anyway, which might be the most ridiculous thing he’s done all day.

 

 _You’re a bitch for love_ , he tells himself, and he discovers with no surprise at all that he’s perfectly okay with that.

 

When he and Darab return to the village, they find Nang and Arman keeping cautious watch over the remaining men of Ghar Waale, who have gathered in an angry circle and are shouting and waving their hands—and various sharp, pointy farming implements—at the cringing figure in the center.

 

They’re like a diorama at the natural history museum with the typed caption:  Angry mob stones a transgressor to death.

 

“What’s going on?” he asks Atal, feeling again Turan’s absence when the man appears not to understand.

 

“They say, ‘Traitor!  Traitor!’” Darab explains, interpreting the shouts.

 

Brad sees through the milling legs that it is Kushan on the ground.  His face is already swollen with bruises, his lip split, and as Brad watches, someone kicks him in the stomach, dropping him to his hands and knees.  A rain of spittle pelts his bowed head and the back of his neck.

 

He is begging for his life, but no one is interested in his pleas.

 

Beyond the men, Brad can see the women and children of the village peering out from the huts nearest the well.  On their faces is imprinted the staring blankness of trauma, a look he’s seen on faces all over the world.  He thinks that if someone could capture the essence of that expression, bottle it so that it could be weaponized and spread over all the representatives bodies, in houses of legislature and dictator’s mansions, in the bedrooms of mullahs who incite war and preachers who invite hate…

 

If that expression of utter devastation, of erasure so impossible that the mind balks to understand it…

 

If that could be harnessed, the world would finally know peace.

  
But even as he’s indulging in uncharacteristic fantasy, the men of Ghar Waale are exacting vengeance upon Kushan.  Brad doesn’t know the cause of their hatred—he hopes it’s not mere knee-jerk scape-goatism—but he’s pretty sure he cannot come between the people and their sense of violation.

 

Darab says, “He worked with enemy.  Gave intel.”

 

“Which enemy?” Brad asks, but the irony is lost on Darab, who has already turned to join Nang and Arman for a smoke.

 

Brad considers that he should do an after-action assessment, figure out who Kushan had been reporting to, what other things he might have told them, but when he reflects on the anger of the mob surrounding the man and the mood of the villagers as a whole, he decides against interfering.

 

Instead, he leaves the village to its vengeance and walks back to Nate’s hut to retrieve the SAT phone.  As the voices fade a little with distance, he notices the ringing in his ears.  His leg hurts, and a hundred tiny cuts on his hands and arms, face and neck sting with sweat and grime.  He’s exhausted to his marrow, and when he arrives at Nate’s hut, he’s tempted to sink down onto the ruined mattress, blood, dried semen, and all, and fall asleep.

 

Instead, he picks up the SAT phone, moves outside to lean against the hut wall, and fiddles with the phone until he’s on a secure frequency to Shkin.  Then he takes a deep breath and asks to speak with Captain Taylor.

 

**19 April 2006.  1015 local time.  Firebase Shkin.  Bermel District, Paktika Province, Afghanistan.**

 

By the time a team had arrived with a second Humvee and Brad and his team had said their farewells to Atal and the villagers, the heat of the morning sun had started to burn the fog off the mountaintops and work its way down the cliff walls.  It was still cold and shadowy in the valleys, though, and the uneven road punished Brad’s aching body.

 

The driver of their Humvee was a new kid who looked younger than Nate had back in OIF, which doesn’t seem possible.  He’d introduced himself as Private Noah Bernstein, “Call me Berns,” and he’d seemed like an okay guy except for the way he’d insisted on asking Brad a million and one questions about their mission to Ghar Waale.

 

  
Apparently, he hadn’t been privy to the real dope, or he’d have known better than to be so eager.

 

As it was, Brad had deflected a lot of the kid’s questions and eventually pawned him off on Nang, who had seemed happy to have a chance to test his grasp of American colloquialisms on Bernstein.

 

Taylor had been waiting outside the operations center when their Humvee had pulled in.  He’d looked like he’d swallowed gun lubricant with a chaser of antifreeze.

 

Now, Brad’s sitting in a chair across from Taylor’s desk, where he’s been for the last two hours.  He has to take a wicked piss, his eyes are red and inflamed with grit, and he’s pretty sure he’s got a dead rat caught in his back teeth, his mouth tastes so foul. 

 

His legendary patience has gotten on the I-don’t-give-a-fuck train and kissed Brad’s ass goodbye.

 

“Look, sir, with all due respect, this is the third time I’ve gone through this with you, and—”

 

“And you’ll go through it three more times, or thirty, or thirty fucking thousand if I say so, Sergeant Colbert.  Do I make myself clear?”

 

“What is your problem?”  Brad asks, adding a “Sir” after a long and deliberate pause.

 

“My problem is that you disobeyed orders, Sergeant Colbert, and engaged with the enemy, which resulted in the loss of not only your Humvee and the wounding of one of the CPTP but also the deaths of several civilians, including, if I’m to understand you, four children.”

 

“As I’ve already noted for the record, sir,” and the last word is a decided epithet, given Brad’s tone, “your orders were, and I quote, ‘Shoot to kill, sergeant, and don’t struggle over the grey areas.’”

 

“Got that in writing anywhere, Colbert?”  Taylor’s sneer is self-satisfied and officious, and it takes all of Brad’s rapidly fraying self-control not to hurdle the desk and punch the shit out of him.

 

“Fuck you, sir.”  He says it succinctly, taking care to enunciate each word.  “You think I’m taking the fall for this?  No fucking way.  I have a little insurance of my own, Taylor, and I’m not going down without taking you with me.  So you decide right now how it’s going to be:  We write it off to those big, bad insurgents in the mountains, maybe feed the intelligence analysts some information about a rat line out of Pakistan, or you shop this bullshit story about me disobeying orders to your superiors and see how long it takes them to get some interesting intel about your own culpability in all of it.”

 

Taylor stares at him, face a mask of cool disdain.  “You’re bluffing.”

 

Brad snorts and flips his hands over on his knees, crooking his fingers:  _Try me_.

 

In fact, Brad has a disabled transmitter in his jacket pocket.  Berns had been more than happy to stop so that Brad could take a leak.  He’d retrieved the transmitter, followed Nate’s instructions on shutting it off without destroying it, and gotten back into the Humvee with Berns none the wiser.

 

Later, Darab had stopped to nod significantly at Brad’s pocket and give him a thumbs up he’d probably learned from Samsoon.

 

  
Brad had winked and smiled and that had been the end of it.  His secrets were safe with Darab.

 

At last, Taylor makes a graceless noise of disgust and throws his hands up.  “Fine, but you aren’t staying on my base.  I want you as far from me as you can fucking get.”

 

“How about Kabul?” Brad suggests, thinking that that’s where Nate’s been sent.

 

Taylor gives him a knowing, ugly smirk.  “He must be a fucking spectacular lay.”

 

Brad doesn’t remember clearing the desk, but he does remember the satisfying feeling of his knuckles plowing the smirk off of Taylor’s face.

 

He hits him once, just once, marshaling the very last of his control with a deep breath and the image of Nate waiting for him somewhere.  Then he releases the choke-hold he’d had on Taylor’s collar and lowers him back into his seat.

 

Taylor’s lip is swelling, and blood trickles from the corner of his mouth.  It’s a good look on him.

 

“You’re done, Colbert,” he lisps, dabbing at his lip with one hand and reaching for his phone with the other.

  
Brad wears his own ugly smirk as he says, “If you’re calling the MPs, I’d think it through.  I end up in the brig or on report, you end up right there with me.”

 

Taylor seethes, narrowing his eyes as if he could determine just by staring what it is that Brad has on him.

 

“Fine.  But you don’t get to call all of the shots.  I want you to submit your request for termination of duty.  It’s time you were honorably discharged, don’t you think, _Gunnery_ Sergeant Colbert?”  He adds special emphasis to the new rank.

 

“Transfer me to Kabul to finish out my five months, give me the E-7 and an open-ended recommendation, and I’ll go without so much as a peep, sir.”

 

He has time for a shower and to throw his gear in his rucksack before there’s a knock at the frame of his door and Private Reese is there to say, “Chopper leaves in ten mikes.”

 

It won’t give him much time to say goodbye, but he guesses that’s for the best.  Cheese is out on patrol with his team, and McClintock and the others are working with another CTPT up at the old water plant.

 

“Thanks, Reese,” he says, shouldering his ruck.

 

“Hey, I heard it was pretty intense up there,” Reese offers, not really pushing but obviously curious.

 

“That it was,” Brad answers, his purposeful movement forcing Reese to clear the doorway.

 

“Glad you made it back in one piece,” Reese says then, clearly reading Brad’s reluctance to talk about it.

 

“Thanks, Reese.  Stay frosty.”

 

“You too.”

 

On the way to the chopper pad, Brad stops by the quarters assigned to his team.  Darab, Nang, and Arman all greet him like an old friend and offer him chai, bread, and sweet nuts.

 

He shakes his head regretfully.  “I’m leaving,” he explains.  “I’ve been reassigned.”

 

“Trouble?” Darab asks, already looking angry on Brad’s behalf.

 

  
“No, no.  It’s all good.  A good day,” he answers.  “They’ll have a new Marine sergeant for you in a few days, and until then, you can train with McGivens and those guys.”

 

It’s a little irregular, but Afghanistan 2006 is no one’s favorite vacation spot, and NCOs are hard to come by.  All the cool kids want to go to Iraq.

 

He exchanges heartfelt goodbyes with the men and promises Darab that he’ll look in on Samsoon as soon as he’s boots on the ground in Kabul.

 

Then he’s hopping into a Chinook, strapping in, and watching the Alamo fade into a smudge on the grey-green landscape.

 

*****

 

**19 April 2006.  1630 local time.  Camp Eggers.  Kabul, Afghanistan.**

 

Samsoon is doing well.  The doctors at the clinic have re-set his broken leg and given him a cast.  When Brad arrives, he’s eating green halal Jell-o and watching M.A.S.H. on television.

 

He answers Samsoon’s questions as patiently as he can, but half of his attention is on the hallway.  He’s waiting to hear approaching footsteps, waiting for a doctor to come to tell him where Nate’s been sent.

 

He had figured that with Nate’s injuries, he’d be sent on to a hospital in Turkey or maybe even Germany, but no one at the clinic’s reception desk had known anything about it, and since then he’s talked to three nurses, two doctors, and a First Sergeant Lloyd, and none of them have even heard the name “Nate Fick.”

  
He tries “Nick Frazier,” too, to no avail.

  
He’d made enough noise, been adamant enough, that they’d finally turned him over to the clinic’s chief administrator, Colonel Everett Whitehall, who’d promised to track down the answers Brad is seeking.

 

He knows Nate’s a spook, but he’s not an actual ghost.  Someone has to know what happened to him.

 

As it turns out, no one does, or if someone does, he’s not saying.  Colonel Whitehall is apologetic in that stiff-lipped way officers often have.

 

“I’ve tried every channel I can think of, Sergeant Colbert, and a few that are, frankly, a little ‘back-channel,’ if you know what I mean.” He shares a conspiratorial wink with Brad.  “No one has heard of your friend.  If he were active military, I’d say that was impossible, but as a civilian, he may have taken himself out of our care and sought private assistance.”

 

“In Kabul, Afghanistan?” Brad doesn’t hide what he thinks about _that_ idea.

 

“There are several well-known, privately funded international clinics here in Kabul, Sergeant.  The military isn’t the only medical game in town.”  

 

Conceding that Nate may have been shunted to a private hospital to help maintain his cover or debrief him or some other kind of spy shit, Brad says goodbye to Samsoon, promising to visit him again when he can, and accepts Whitehall’s offer to let Brad use an unclaimed office so that he can get on the horn to area medical facilities.  When neither Nate’s actual name nor his nom de guerre ping any radars, Brad resorts to describing Nate’s appearance and the nature of his wounds.

 

Still nothing.

 

Unwilling to admit defeat but too exhausted to make himself be understood to yet another front line receptionist who speaks heavily accented English, Brad once again shoulders his rucksack and heads for the temporary quarters assigned to him at Camp Eggers.  He has only energy enough to take his boots off and then he’s dead to the world, lost in a welter of disturbing dreams that he remembers only in fragments the next day.

 

**25 April 2006.  0830 local time.  Camp Eggers.  Kabul, Afghanistan.**

 

Six days.

 

That’s how long Brad’s spent in limbo.  With no orders, he hasn’t got anywhere to be, but nor can he leave Camp Eggers.  He’s called every medical clinic, hospital, and aid station in Afghanistan, spoken to everyone from the guy who guides in the choppers to a two-star general who’d come through on a tour.  No one has any idea who Nate Fick is or where he might’ve gone.

 

On day four, Brad had tracked down the Chinook pilot, but he’d only shaken his head and said, “Sorry, man, I’m just the taxi driver.  Once the fare is out of my cab, I have no idea what happens to them.”

 

The only bright spot of his six days of growing frustration and gnawing anxiety is on day five when he runs into Lance Corporal Ezekiel “Ziggy” Echeverra, who’s on his way back to the Alamo from family leave.

 

“Everything okay back home?” Brad asks after they’ve exchanged back-slaps and complicated handshakes.

 

“Yeah, yeah, it’s all good, sir.  My mama came through the surgery just fine and my Aunt Lo came up from Florida to take care of her and my little sister.  Mama was happy to see me, though.  She lit up like a Christmas tree.”

 

They have lunch together before Ziggy has to catch his chopper, shooting the shit and talking about their team.  

 

“Hey, what’s the new LT like?” Ziggy asks as Brad walks him to the helicopter pad.

 

“McGivens?  Young, you know, but I think he’s got what it takes.  He’s got a level head.  You’ll get along.”

 

“Good to know, bro,” Ziggy says, repeating their earlier greeting signs but in reverse.  “Take it easy,” he says, jogging toward the waiting Chinook.

 

“Stay frosty,” Brad calls, waving as the chopper lifts off.  It reminds him of the last time he saw Nate and brings it all back to him, the crushing frustration and burgeoning despair.  He’s got a bad feeling about what’s happened to Nate and has to force his brain not to conjure Draconian images of subterranean holding cells, Chinese water torture, rubber hoses.

 

 _Get a grip, Colbert_ , he tells himself, but it doesn’t help.

 

**1 May 2006.  1225 local time.  Camp Eggers.  Kabul, Afghanistan.**

 

Twelve days into his unintended vacation, Brad receives a message to report to HQ.  He bums a ride from a passing H&S truck and hops off at the headquarters building, which resembles nothing so much as one of those one-story stucco office complexes that seem to spring up every two miles in the suburbs.

 

Inside, he’s asked to wait at the main reception desk while a bright-eyed female lieutenant mutters into a phone.  

 

“He’ll be out to get you in a few minutes,” she tells Brad, and Brad can’t help but ask, “Who?”

 

She looks confused and then startled, as if this sort of question isn’t often asked. 

 

“What?”  

 

“Who will be a few minutes?  The message just told me to come here.  I don’t know who I’m supposed to see.”

 

“Oh!  General Aldridge, Sergeant.”

 

Shit.  This can’t be good.

 

But General Herbert “Bert” Aldridge is one of those broad-chested, red-faced, back-slapping guys who wants the NCOs to feel that they can really talk to him.  Brad’s met a few of his type in his day, and he settles in for a half-hour of hail-fellow-well-met bullshit that will amount to a handful of nothing.

 

As he suspects, the general wants to know what Brad thinks about what’s happening up at “the Alamo.”  Aldridge uses the nickname like he’s cool, and he actually leans forward on his desk to make it seem like they’re just two guys shooting the shit.

 

“It’s dangerous up there, sir.  We don’t have enough men or guns, we’re too far from reliable air support, and the mountains are full of rat lines running fresh jihadists out of the madrassas in Pakistan right into our laps.”

 

“Well, tell me how you really feel, sergeant,” the general blusters, making like he’s Brad’s best friend.

 

“You asked for my opinion, sir.”

 

“And I got it, by god!”  Aldridge roars with laughter, face growing redder by the minute.

 

“But what I really need to know, son, is...is there anything _unusual_ going on?  Anything you might’ve felt funny reporting to your superiors.”

 

Either Taylor had a friend in Aldridge and wanted to feel out the level of Brad’s commitment to keeping his mouth shut or someone else, someone considerably above Taylor’s pay grade, isn’t sure what Brad knows or doesn’t know.

 

Either way, the smart answer is, “No, sir.”

 

“Good to hear, son.  Well, I won’t keep you.  You’ll have orders in a day or two.  I think you’ll like what we’ve got you doing.”

 

“Sir, could I ask you a question?”

 

“Of course, sergeant.”

 

“Have you heard of a Nate Fick or Nick Frazier?”

 

An odd, foxy expression crosses the general’s face, there and then gone in a flash.  It might’ve been indigestion, Brad guesses.  Or maybe the general is a lot smarter than he acts.  Whatever the case, he only says, “No, son, I’m afraid not.  Friend of yours?”

 

Brad shrugs.  “Old marine buddy.”

 

“Semper fi,” Aldridge gruffs, smiling to beat the band.

 

“Semper fi, sir,” Brad answers obediently, closing the door behind him.

 

**3 May 2006.  1000 local time.  Camp Eggers.  Kabul, Afghanistan.**

 

Brad’s orders arrive in the sweaty hands of a private who doesn’t bother to introduce himself.  He thrusts the paper at Brad with a breathless, “Your orders, sir,” and then jogs away, a stack of similar papers bouncing in his grip.

 

Since he’s no closer to locating Nate and is starting to think that Nate doesn’t want to be found, which is the better of his many maunderings, the worst being that Nate is dead and therefore can’t contact Brad, Brad opens his orders more out of a sense that it’ll pass the time than any real desire to see what he’s supposed to be doing next.

 

Turns out he’s been promoted, which he’d expected, and paired with a Gunny Brown to train a unit of Afghan National Police in close combat techniques.

 

“Huh,” Brad says, thinking about the assignment.  He’s not really a hand-to-hand expert, except for the whole recon marine thing, but he figures he’s got a lot of experience training Afghans.  If he’s got to kill time until he figures out where the hell Nate is, he thinks this’ll be as good a gig as any.

 

Turns out he’s half right.

 

**10 September 2006. 0930 Pacific Time.  Camp Pendleton, California, United States of America.**

 

Brad’s not expecting much when his feet hit the deck at Pendleton.  He’d expressly forbidden his parents from doing the meet-and-greet thing yet again; it was hard on his mom, and he didn’t want her making the trip.  His dad would have had to rearrange everything to make the time.  It just wasn’t worth it.  He’d see them in a couple of weeks, make a point of it.

 

He’s thinking about the shower in his apartment, a beer, and his bed, in that order, when someone shoves into him with enough force to knock him back a step.

 

  
“Watch where the fuck you’re going!” he barks, forgetting for a moment that he’s surrounded by civilians—wives and kids, grandmas and grandpas, little sisters and older brothers, moms and dads and family dogs.

 

When Brad turns to see who the rude son of a bitch is, his next words—about the SOB’s likely parentage and his chances of surviving until lunch—catch in his throat and all the sounds of excited, overjoyed greetings fall away until it’s only his blood pounding in his ears and Nate Fick taking up his entire field of vision.

 

Nate’s wearing a shit-eating grin, a polo and khakis, and Sperrys.  He’s holding a little Igloo cooler in one hand and the keys to Brad’s bike in the other.

 

“What—?” he starts, unable to finish for the host of questions begging to be asked.

 

_What are you doing here?  Where the hell have you been?  How the fuck did you get the keys to my bike?_

 

Nate snorts and rolls his eyes—fucking _rolls his eyes_ —and says, “Spook, remember?  Or should I say ex-spook?”

 

“Jesus, Nate,” Brad breathes, crowding into his space without thinking, wanting to be pressed up against all of him, wanting to suck the breath from his mouth just to know that he’s actually here, alive and well.

 

“Just Nate is fine, Brad,” Nate teases, taking a step back and raising his eyebrows, reminding Brad about where they are and who’s watching.

 

He doesn’t fucking care.  Except that he’s not quite out of the Marines yet, and he really would like to keep his pension and benefits.  So maybe he does care, a little.  But he really wishes he didn’t have to.

 

“That beer?” he asks nonchalantly, turning around and heading toward the gate at an easy stroll, Nate falling in beside him like that was the plan all along, for Nate to meet Brad here and bring beer and Brad’s bike so they could cruise up the coast to Brad’s apartment, where Brad would take him apart with his mouth and his hands and put them both back together as he did.

 

“Yep.”

 

“I’m driving.”

 

“Naturally.”

 

**11 September 2006. 0600 Pacific Time.  Oceanside, California.  United States of America.**

 

The call of the waves wakes him, a thunder in his blood that drives him out of their warm bed and into board shorts and a hoodie.  He slides into flip-flops and scuffs down the stairs to the street, walks with purpose toward the beach one block away.  He doesn’t leave a note.  Nate will know where to find him.

  
Nate always knows where to find him.

 

Last night, Nate had opened Brad up, driven so far inside that a part of him would never leave Brad again.  He feels it now as he walks, a twinging reminder of where Nate’s been, and it makes him heavy low in his belly, deep in his core.  There’s a hickey throbbing steadily on the thin skin over his collarbone, and every time the hoodie brushes it, it sends electricity racing down to his fingertips.

 

He wants to bury them in Nate’s hair and curl them until Nate moans.

 

The beach is empty except for a few hardy souls out on their boards in wetsuits.  The water’s still warm enough, but the air is cool for this time of year, with a premature autumnal nip that encourages big, gusting breaths.

 

Brad sinks to the sand and props his arms on his knees, content to watch the surfers catch their waves and listen to the cries of the gulls and the distant sea buoys tolling their doleful song.

 

 

A scuff in the sand at his back brings Brad out of his reverie, which happened to be occupied by images of the man sitting down beside him in the sand.

 

 

Nate hands him a travel mug, and Brad sips it without hesitation, closing his eyes as the divine brew hits his tongue.

 

  
“You can stay,” Brad half-jokes when he opens his eyes again, and Nate gives him a fond smile and bumps him with his shoulder.

  

They’re an acceptable distance apart for two straight guys sharing their morning Joe.

 

Brad wants to shove Nate down and get sand into all of his most sensitive places.

 

He settles for another private smile over the rim of his cup.

 

“I think we should spend the day fucking in your back hallway,” Nate says as a conversation starter.

  

Brad chokes on his coffee and nods vigorously, blinking away the ensuing cough-tears.  “Sounds like a plan,” Brad concurs when he can wheeze out a facsimile of speech.

 

“And then we should spend the rest of our lives fucking anywhere and everywhere we can.”

 

“Also a plan,” Brad answer smoothly, as if the love of his life hasn’t just asked him, more or less, to marry him.  Or whatever the equivalent of marriage is in whatever state they end up living.

 

Nate had filled Brad in on where he’d been, which had been a very brief conversation—“Classified”—and told him what had happened to Darwesh (adopted by a “good Pakistani family who had lost their only son to a suicide bomber”).

 

Then Nate had shifted the focus firmly to the future, where he saw himself going, a discussion that took quite a lot longer, broken up as it was by vigorous fucking.

 

In between discussions and lovemaking, there’d been moments when Nate’s gaze had gone distant, when Brad knew he was reliving things he’d survived but would never share with Brad.  Brad can accept that because he accepts all of Nate, even the secrets, even the unknown and maybe unknowable parts.

 

Since Brad himself had never expected to leave the Marine Corps alive, he’s having a little trouble with the whole future thing himself, so he’s grateful for Nate’s sense of confidence as he asserts now, “I’ve got a couple of private sector offers, or I might go back to school.  If you wanted to do that, I’d help you with the applications.  Or we could look for a job you like and I could move with you.  Whatever.”

 

Whatever.

 

“One plan at a time,” Brad says, standing up and brushing sand off his ass.

 

Nate grins and rises, says, “Race you to the hall,” and takes off running.

 

Since he’s wearing sneakers and Brad’s in flip-flops, Nate is out of sight before Brad can even leave the beach, but it’s okay.  Brad knows where Nate’s going because he always knows where Nate is.

 

Nate’s home.

**Author's Note:**

> The following books were particularly helpful as I researched and wrote this story:
> 
> Bradley, Major Rusty and Kevin Maurer. _Lions of Kandahar_. Bantam, 2011.
> 
> Maurer, Kevin. _Gentlemen Bastards: On the Ground in Afghanistan with America’s Elite Special Forces_. Berkley Caliber, 2012
> 
> Mullins, Nathan. _Keep Your Head Down: One Commando’s Brutally Honest Account of Fighting in Afghanistan_. Allen  & Unwin, 2011.
> 
> Parnell, Sean (with John Bruning). _Outlaw Platoon: Heroes, Renegades, Infidels, and the Brotherhood of War in Afghanistan_. HarperCollins, 2012.
> 
> Rico, Johnny. _Blood Makes the Grass Grow Green: A Year in the Desert with Team America_. Presidio Press, 2011.
> 
> The following websites were indispensable in researching this story:
> 
> Afghan culture, dress, names, etc: www.khyber.org
> 
> Map of Paktika Province: http://www.afghana.com/GetLocal/Afghanistan/Provinces/Pics/Paktika.JPG
> 
> Palm English-to-Pashto guide for US military personnel: http://www.military.com/ContentFiles/palm-english-to-pashto-afghani.txt
> 
> For information about casualties by region in OEF: iCasualties.org
> 
> For getting a sense of the medical care available in Afghanistan for US military personnel: http://www.dcoe.health.mil/Content/navigation/documents/TSC_Presentations/Silvia%20-%20Medical%20Care%20in%20Theater.pdf
> 
> And yes, as much as it pains me to say it: Wikipedia.org provided a starting point for many, many searches.
> 
> Finally, two sources that provided inspiration and character notes are, of course, Evan Wright’s _Generation Kill_ and Nate Fick’s _One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Corps Officer_.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [(Podfic of) A Road Too Far by Sylvanwitch](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3662952) by [chemm80](https://archiveofourown.org/users/chemm80/pseuds/chemm80)




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